


Beatty, 1988

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, Childhood, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Gen, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, POV Dean Winchester, POV John Winchester, POV Outsider, POV Sam Winchester, Pre-Series, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-20
Updated: 2010-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4310973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are hunts that go down smooth, just enough kick, relished and savored. Others are just a date and a name. </p><p>John and his children, who are already showing signs of the men they'll grow to be. Pre-series (Dean is 9, Sam is 5).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**august lasts.**

 

Pastor Jim calls her a Beech Duchess 76. He calls her a beautiful aircraft, and asks Sam if he agrees. Sam doesn't, really, because Pastor Jim also tells him that Dad and Dean are taking her to California. _They'll be back soon; don't worry._ Pastor Jim holds Sam's hand as they watch from the second-story window, and the plane gets smaller and smaller until Sam can't hardly see it in the sky. That's how small it is by the time Sam realizes that it's not going to turn around. 

That it's not coming back.

Eventually Pastor Jim goes downstairs. Sam stays at the window by himself, staring at the place where Beech Duchess--and Dad, and Dean--disappeared. "Why did I get left?" he asks in a small voice (he is already five; he's outgrown small voices, he knows it). But no one is around to answer, and that makes him feel smaller still.

And because counting makes him feel big, Sam counts the minutes they've been gone. 

He's good at counting. He could probably count forever. Even so, Dad and Dean are gone for a big number of minutes--one that's beyond even his abilities. 

Sam doesn't like the thought. He switches to counting cracks in the ceiling instead. 

Not that he's counting toward anything in particular, because sometimes "three days" is three days, and sometimes it's seven. He's five years old and he can count to thirty-one, knows all twelve months _(in order)_ , and can tell time so long as it's on the half hour and before noon. He's not quite sure where Dad gets 16:00, because he's never seen a clock that went up that high. 

He's good at counting, but even better at dates, because Dad is made up of a handful of numbers and months, and not much else. But Dean stands by "January 24th," "four days," and "no later than midnight" like they're more than they seem, and for now that's good enough for Sam. (He'd been asked once what his Daddy was like, by a lady who'd served him a tall glass of shirley temple, with the cherry in it and everything. He told her, "My dad is April 7th. He promised." She laughed. Maybe she'd known Dad was actually April 13th. Maybe 16:00 is Dad's code for "not today.")

Finally, Pastor Jim comes back. He asks Sam if his ceiling's as nice as the Sistine Chapel and Sam says yes, because Sam figures Pastor Jim wants to hear that this stupid white ceiling is as nice as his sister's, but Pastor Jim laughs like the shirley temple lady did and pulls something special from his pocket.

"Might I suggest you count these instead? It might help."

Beads. Beads like the ocean, all blue streaked with white veins, and beads like the sky, clouded white but otherwise clear. A dangling cross.

Pastor Jim places them in Sam's hands. These are Hail Marys; there are ten of them. This is Our Father. You say their names and move your fingers down the lines, like so.

It's a little strange. Sam's pretty sure Dad approves of the Cross (well, he threw it into a fully-drawn tub, once), but he's never spoken to it. So there's Our Father; his and Dean's. Hail Mary, Mom. 

And well, Dean is turning ten soon, so that all works out well enough for Sam. Dean is the blue beads.

_Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Our Father._

Pastor Jim chuckles and turns to leave. "May God be with you," he says. 

Sam doesn't know what that means.

 

**call waiting (i).**

 

Pastor Jim's telephone is silent and his clock is not.

A call would've been nice. Sam doesn't know why he's expecting one, because when Dad is on business, he tends to stay that way until he walks in the front door. He doesn't call, just disappears. But Dean, he thought, maybe--

\--Or maybe not.

Phone calls are like everything else Sam wants and will not get. To be in the habit of making and receiving phone calls, you have to have a phone, for one. And a consistent phone number. And a house. A house with working electricity and that the phone company knows is yours. They don't have that. Instead, they have a flurry of bad motels, some apartments if they're lucky. Life is hoarding the complimentary muffins from the good motels, living off your fat at the bad ones. Life is sitting in a car with Dean for fourteen hours, then stopping, and sitting in a motel room for fourteen more.

Sam's first best memory is waking up in the same bed for four months straight. He remembers pawing at the threadbare swatch on his bedsheets and delighting in the fact that it was there and he knew it would be. He remembers looking out the window (careful not to disturb the snowy layer of salt on the sill) and knowing he'd see the lady next door, parading around her flat in tap shoes and wearing what looked like a robe made out of crocodile garden hose.

Sam's first worst memory is watching Dean walk out the front door with Dad for four months straight, watching him walk out and leave him _alone_ , at the mercy of Ms. Aliza Gallagher. 

She is Dean's tap-dancing crocodile-wearing God-fearing substitute, and she is not a good one.

Four months pass and they hit the road again, and again it's fourteen hours of driving with Dean, and fourteen hours of waiting. But something's different.

It's different and it doesn't ever turn back.

School, genius, says Dean. It's right next to Hell; look it up. Sam loves school. (Sam loves school because he hates his brother, because how's he supposed to look it up if he can't read? And if Dean hates it, then it's Sam's duty to supply due affection to the offending item.

Dean hates salad—especially the red cabbage restaurants put in it, no matter what state you’re in or what kind of salad you order. Sam’s favorite. Dean likes Ohio license plates (at least, when they're in Ohio he does). Sam likes Alaska, because he's pretty sure he's never seen one. And he wouldn't know it if he did.) 

But mostly, Dean likes going out with Dad; and Sam hates it when Dean goes. 

"Just eat your salad." And Dean scowls, and Dad sighs, and it's really neither of them doing neither of those things, because it's Pastor Jim sitting across the table from him, and he's asking if he'd pass the dressing, please.

Because Dad and Dean are off having a grand adventure together, forgetting about him with an ease Sam can only hope to master as time drags on.

When he grows up and has adventures of his own, he will remember not to call.

After dinner, Sam lies under the covers and listens to Pastor Jim's snores. He excavates Pastor Jim's beads from his shirt pocket and twists one of the beads experimentally. He whispers, _Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Our Father._

Pastor Jim made good on his promise.

He doesn't feel quite so alone. _Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Our Father._ Until he goes drifts into sleep, _Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Hail Mary. Our Father._

 

**fear (i).**

 

The job is easy. 

It can't go wrong.

The job is a perfect training ground for you, John tells Dean, and he's pretty sure he means it. Because Dean is nearly ten, and he's got to learn somewhere, right? It's just a nest of kelpies in Oakland Bay. 

It's easy.

Of course, they are only seven hours out from a refueling in South Dakota, and Dean's making it full-obvious that the flight _there_ is not so easy.

Dean's kept his eyes and his mouth clamped shut since take-off, but his body language is roaring bloody murder. His hands, white-knuckled, are vises on the seat cushion. His left foot taps out a jittery rhythm that is accompanied by the wet sound of his tongue sliding back and forth along his teeth. His breaths complete the little one man ensemble he has going in the back seat of the aircraft, staccato and syncopated.

"Don't waste your fear on something that's not gonna hurt you, kid." _You know what's out there._

(Four months later Pan Am Flight 103 goes down. Dean tapes the clipping to the Impala's dashboard but says nothing. It's the tail end of the passive-aggression that he grows out of around the same time he starts sleeping with his knife. Sam inherits the attitude and as far as John knows, is going to keep it 'til the end of days. Nevertheless, John amends his statement. _Don't scare from things you can't fix._ )

Dean nods, Yessir, but the plane dips in the air and Dean's wordless, white-faced fearsong persists.

John redirects his attentions, full concentration on the controls in front of him.

It's nothing to worry about. Just turbulence. 

Turbulence. John hasn't flown in a long time. In fact, he's pretty sure the last time he went up, it was with Joe Shilling, Air Force vet, and he himself had done very little of the actual flying. But John knew aircraft theory to the letter, and that just had to be enough.

It was going to be enough.

Sometime between John's keeping tabs on Dean and keeping tabs on the sky, the world dons its evening blues. Above the cloud cover, everything is listless, matte. The plane's lights send a scattershot of red-yellow-white across the landscape directly ahead, but even these stop short, brilliance cleaved in two by lack of contrast. John imagines this is what Hell looks like. Nothing moves, and there is nothing you can do to change it.

It should be Heaven, judging from the location. But at this point John is so turned around he's not sure where they are. The dials and gauges are not beneficial. It is midnight, it has been ten hours, and they have flown consistently southwest. By John's estimations, this means two things: They need to land and refuel, and that landing probably won't be disastrous, because they won't have hit the Pacific quite yet.

"Beech Duchess 76. Beech Duchess 76, come in. You are flying in restricted airspace. Supply identifying information immediately."

Of course. 

His name is Joe Shilling, he says; he's from Lawrence, Kansas; and no, he did not die in 1974. John has a funny way of memorializing his friends, but he hopes they understand that he is grateful.

 

\--

 

Dad knows what he's doing. And that almost makes it worse, because Dad knows what he's doing, and Dad knows what it's doing to _him_. Dean's probably going to drown in his own spit, because swallowing draws too much of his attention away from Not Dying to be truly appropriate at the moment. It doesn't help that his stomach is already turned to kelpie or whatever the hell is waiting for them in California. (Why couldn't they have driven? Why couldn't they have borrowed some money, got the car back? Why did it even land in the impound lot in the first place? Why did Pastor Jim even have a plane? Why were they flying in it? Why was California so far away? Why why _why_ \--?)

On second thought. 

If he's busy swallowing he'll be too busy to cry, which is where he's pretty sure his tight breaths, hitching up further and further in his throat, are headed. And Dean Winchester is nine years old. He's not gonna cry.

Shoulders, relax. Throat, deconstrict. Kelpie-fied stomach?--quit the panicked flip flops. Dean takes a deep breath and the airplane nosedives sharply, overtaken by a stray crosswind. Dean gasps, chokes, and doesn't stop coughing until Dad sorts the plane out and they're flying as smoothly as is possible in a little tin death trap. _Dad knows what he's doing._ As he coughs he draws in deep gulps of air--the calming breaths he doesn't want Dad to hear, though he's not quite sure why.

Dad's not blind, after all.

The airplane takes a swandive and leaves Dean's stomach somewhere up above the clouds.

"Beech Duchess 76. Beech Duchess 76, come in. You are flying in restricted airspace. Supply identifying information immediately."

Dad grunts something, which is lost in the shuddering racket the plane is making. Pastor Jim will not be pleased if this thing doesn't make it to California. _Dean_ will not be pleased if _they_ do not make it back to grab Sammy, and never do this again.

They spiral lower, lower, lower, finally breaking the cloud barrier. There's nothing below them, and nothing above. They are nowhere.

"Beech Duchess 76. Beech Duchess 76, come in. You are flying in restricted airspace. Supply identifying information immediately."

Plane swerves again. The anxiety has moved past Dean's stomach and bled into everything else, jellied and kelpied and it's like there isn't anything else left. His grip is fear and his scowl is fear and the stars dancing in front of his screwed-shut eyes, that's fear, too. Imagination.

"--restricted airspace. Supply identifying information--"

Dad shuts the radio down. Shuts everything down but the lights and the engine. And Dean shuts down because if he's gonna die, he doesn't want the last thing he sees to be the back of his dad's head as it flies through the windshield of a crashing plane.

Nevertheless, he's pretty sure it's the last thing he's going to feel.

 

\--

 

Something is wrong.

"Beech Duchess 76. Beech Duchess 76, come in. You are flying in restricted airspace. Supply identifying information immediately."

John's eyes snap to the radio. Everything is dark. Insistently, the message repeats. Again.

Again.

And John is in his element. This is not about static interference. This is not about flying a personal aircraft. This is about skirting evil, and for the last four years, there isn't anything John's been better at.

The message itself isn't immediately helpful. There is nothing suspicious about a tower flag. Maybe it came from a military base, the local airport. The former is more likely, given that apparently they're flying in a restricted zone--

\--The plane groans like a woman scorned, but John pays her little mind. The cogs in his brain are turning, already mapping the case he's not even going to properly have 'til tomorrow. But the familiarity of process, the _known_ unknown, is a conduit for conviction, and it's all muscle memory from here. It's as much a homecoming as any. 

John pulls up slightly as the ground swims into view just below. _'S gonna be okay, kid,_ he wants to say. But during his lifetime, John has said that to so many poor dying bastards, the words don't mean what they used to. He can't say that now. Not here. Not to Dean.

The plane makes ground contact with a jolt, metal screeches like it probably shouldn't, but for a fugitive plane on a stretch of dirt, it's not bad. Dean makes a sound like pain, but John doesn't look back. Road's been clean and smooth as dirt gets, but that doesn't mean it's going to stay that way.

They barrel down the highway, far as their momentum takes them, a comet slicing through dark. They encounter nothing but brush and dirt and shards of brightness that are either broken glass or spots of rain wet.

Finally, they are still. John shuts everything down, 'til there's nothing to see but black and gray, and nothing to hear but Dean's choppy breaths, already fogging the windows (how cold can it be, in August? wherever they've landed) and the eternal drone from the phantom radio. Something's calling Beech Duchess. And however Jim worked this plane over, John's pretty sure it wasn't nearly enough.

 

**ricochet.**

 

Being sick just takes too much effort. Dean lies boneless in his seat and he's never going to move again. Nine hours of pure torture and suddenly the pall is lifted and life doesn't even have the decency to send relief his way. Just a jagged sense of loss and a desperate apprehension that doesn't even have a source anymore. He's still all wires; his muscles scream _push_ but there's no pull, no tension. Like a broken Slinky. Once stretched, irreparable--it's right there on the warning label. Dean resolves to die on the spot.

But then, plane's already haunted. It'd be redundant.

Either way, Dean is not in a forgiving mood. Da-- _John Winchester_ forges onward as though Dean's forgiveness or lack thereof doesn't really register. The plane door creaks open, and _John_ slides out. "Snap to, kiddo."

Dean's heart and stomach and lungs are an oily soup in his chest cavity, and he can't throw it up because he's misplaced his throat, too; and Da-- _John Winchester_ doesn't even care.

Typical.

But Dean snaps to, and makes his dazed way to John's side.

"Good thing there was an air strip here."

There's a glow off in the distance, faint but yellow with the tinge of artificial light. Airstrips have airports. Towers that don't like it when you land on their runway uninvited. Dean glances back at the flying deathtrap as they walk out toward the light. It's bent weirdly in some places, but it looks as smug as ever. He can just make out the droning radio, but he knows as well as John that whatever's sending the message, it's not a transponder, and there aren't people on the other end.

Ghosts and curses. Of course. Sometimes Dean thinks hunters are the reason all these things exist, not the other way around--what with the way evil finds them. They aren't even _looking_. 

Evil is kelpies in California and that's it. End of story.

California's not all it's cracked up to be, if this is it. Bare land mostly. Evil is having nothing to look at but fuzzy yellow light in the distance. 

Cold, still air that jackets can't keep out. Evil is wastelands not having thermostats.

Bits and pieces of things underfoot go crunch. Fine dust garnished with splintered wood and glass shards, like the aftermath of mass destruction. Evil is not having thick-soled shoes.

 

\--

 

Dean appears to be blaming Russia and nuclear holocaust for everything. Evil is whatever guy said evil was ignorance, because that's stupid because _you know what's out there_ , and--

John wonders what television and the tabloids are saying, because it's 1988, not the Cuban Missile Crisis. John's just going to ride this one out, because he doesn't want to risk prodding where Dean doesn't want to be poked. They can save the falling out for tomorrow morning, when they're rested and not wandering lost.

Same goes for Beech Duchess. Something's up, that's for sure, but they need information first. (And probably salt.) John has a silver throwing knife and a .45 on his person and an arsenal in his pack, but what he really needs is a history. 

And a damn apology. If you're going to dole out information on a need-to-know basis, you better be damned sure people have it when they _do_ need it. He and Jim are gonna have some words.

John scowls at Beech Duchess. Plane's not going anywhere, and judging from the landscape, it's not gonna hurt anyone. Silver lining.

In the background of John's thoughts, Dean continues his tirade breathlessly. 

John is certain no one else finds The Day After as comforting a self-defense mechanism as his son does.

Dean is pale in the moonlight, sweaty from their flight (which did not bring them nearly as close to death as he seems to think) and shivering from their present desert trek.

John shrugs his jacket from his shoulders, disentangles it from the pack's straps, and drops it onto Dean's head.

Dean looks up, and wears it like a victory cape. 

 

\--

 

It doesn't mean anything close to _I'm sorry_ and never will. But it means _I know_ and that is good enough. Maybe better.

John Winchester is Dad again.


	2. Chapter 2

**forty-five.**

 

It's a young man and a very old one, coming his way. The young one leads. He has a vaguely militant air about him, but a commanding stride he was born with, not drilled into. The old man is crooked, hunched. Vindictive, but ill with something he isn't going to fight with hell and spitfire. Looks a lot like fear warmed over. 

Andrew Kimmel's got good eyes; _knows_ these things, he does. And they're a good half-mile out, yet. He might be a ragged old man, but he's been here longer than anyone. He can spot the lost and wounded.

And he knows when they're going to come knocking. They always do. Always do. As though keeping a light on is an automatic invitation to just any chaff running around out there. He prepares to tell them as much when their fists rattle the entire damned bus, banging the door down, like it's some god-fucking mansion and he's not gonna hear them if they just knock quiet-like, like reasonable folk. 

Then again. In all the time he's been here, he's never met reasonable folk. And tonight, he is wrong about his needy comers.

It is not an old man at all; it is a child, swallowed up in the tent of his old man's coat. And the 'young man' up close doesn't seem as young as he did from way out across the way. Andrew Kimmel has never been wrong before.

And while he _has_ had people tell him they just need directions, is all, he holds the door open for _these_ folk and they follow him in. These folk are Dr. Jack and Vince Latham, out of Winchester, Virginia. They're looking for gas, of course. 

They're always looking for gas.

There is no gas here. And damned if he knows where you can get any; what does he look like, the Yellow Pages? He hasn't had any gas in near a month. Just waiting for the Air Force to run on by in their little truck so he can blow their tires out and hey, you look like military, boy. What're you running around with a kid for? Military's gone to kidnapping again, eh? He knew it, he always knew it, that's why he's not surprised--kid-stealers, gas-siphoners, all. Well, next they come round, _he'll_ show them, he'll show them they can't take an old man down so easy!

Andrew Kimmel reaches for his rifle.

Jack Latham has a knife pressed to his throat and the nose of a gun cold against his belly, fast as thought. Jack Latham is definitely not like anyone else who's come before, that's for sure. Whether this change of pace is a good or bad thing is undecided, but things ain't looking all too peachy right now. Jack Latham appears to agree.

But the scariest thing about the whole mess?

Kid's got a .45 trained on him, too. Pops it out of his old man's jacket and flips the safety, smooth as smiling. It's not the motions of a kid who grew up wishing for a Red Ryder, or a kid who shot rats from the loft in the barn--way he holds it, this gun's shot things that knew they were being aimed at.

Kid can't be more than nine.

 

\--

 

John hates doing things like that, but a showdown with crotchety locals in an enclosed space isn't really something he has the patience to give the benefit of the doubt. Best forego the handling of rifles of any sort.

The man is scared, John can smell it. But he's not scared of the knife, or the gun. He's not even looking at them. He's scared of the people that'd raise things like that to him in the first place.

And John knows, knows too well, that he cannot make it up to him. But he has some cash in his wallet, and John also knows that fifty bucks in the right place is known to have analgaesic properties--is even known to encourage selective amnesia, in extremely fortunate cases. "We just need to know if there's a refueling station nearby. Were you lying about your gas? This bus run? Or any of the other jalopies you got?"

No, no of course not. If you're even asking that question, you already know the cards never fall in your favor.

But there _is_ a town. Of course there's a town.

"Bring me back some of that gasoline and I'll tell you the direction. And the name, so's you know you're in the right place."

John thinks that replacing the weaponry with Ulysses S. Grant's fifty dollar mug shot has made the old man--his name is Andrew Kimmel, or so he says--a little too at home with them. As though the man with the knife and the kid with the gun are an illusion, far removed from the nice folk, Dr. Jack Latham from Virginia, and his boy, Vince, who have more than enough money to throw around during their charming little trans-American vacation flight. But it's too late now, and the money and information exchange persons with chagrined amiability.

Beatty. Beatty, Nevada (and John sees Dean is more than a little crushed that they haven't even reached California yet). Straight east couple of miles. No, not towards Cali. Got Death Valley west, like hell you're gonna make it on foot. Just go east. Big town; a thousand regulars, at least.

John smiles broadly. 

Andrew Kimmel pockets the fifty. "Come back with a couple gallons for this old gal"--he raps his knuckles on the bus's metal shell--"and I'll let you slide with just the fifty."

If John comes back with gasoline for Andrew Kimmel, it's going to be in the stomach of a wheel barrow and it's going to be on fire when he funnels it into the gas tank. But he smiles again--his face is pinched he's smiling so wide--and says thank you.

He figures that at least Jack Latham and his boy Vince are thankful. Andrew Kimmel gave them ten minutes of life. (The real Jack and Vince died in 1962. Vince of pediatric leukemia, Jack of a bullet to the temple. Yet here they are, making their way towards a gas station in Beatty, Nevada.)

John speaks. "Beatty, huh. And we're supposed to walk the state 'til we find some town." It could be worse.

Dean shrugs; the great sleeves of John's coat damp the movement. Another couple of yards, and Dean magicks a map of Nevada, a gas receipt--Beatty's own Rebel Gas--and a roll of quarters from inside his jacket.

John's face mirrors the shit-eating grin plastering itself across Dean's.

It's the little things. It really is.

 

**a shopping cart in nebraska.**

 

Sam wakes up lonely. Like he'd had his fill of Dean, Dad, and himself in dreams, and here he was by himself again. Pastor Jim was awake and downstairs already. He rises from his nest of blankets on the couch and finds the bed made, curtains drawn. He sinks down and tries to go back to sleep. Restart the dream.

It hadn't been special or anything. Like they were doing family things or even having a good time. It was mostly real, which was a disappointment, because dreaming about last April isn't much fun. Dad wasn't _there_ there, like usual. They were in a big town, bigger than he was used to, and Dad had melted into a network of big stores with shiny plastic letters on the sides: WAL*MART and SEARS. Sam can almost read but neither of those mean anything to him.

Dean says it doesn't matter; they're not going in. Sam isn't too familiar with parking lots this size, but he's familiar with waiting. They don't even have a clock.

Time passes, and it's the fast-slow that happens in dreams, where eternity crawls by in a second--you know it's been forever but you don't know what you've been doing the whole time. Like on TV when the scene fades out and back in, and suddenly it's been a whole month.

They've cleaned out the glove compartment (one stick of gum; Sam gets it. He hates the flavor but he chews it until it's empty and rubbery), and there's only so many times they can lock and unlock the doors.

"Let's go find a shopping cart."

But they don't have any money. And Dad could be back any minute.

Dean scoffs. "Yeah, and maybe he was busy buying tickets to the moon. And we're not going to the store. _How_ would that be interesting?"

They run across the lot like thieves until they find an overturned cart. Dean wrenches it upright, and he can just barely curl his chin over the handlebar. Sam can touch it if he jumps.

Get inside, Sammy. Nah, it'll be alright. It's like a cage in the zoo. Right where you belong. Dean starts pumping his legs and the bottom of his shoes scrape against the pavement, purchaseless for a moment before the cart begins to roll forward. Once it starts it doesn't stop. Just goes faster and faster and faster--

Finally Dean swings onto the bottom piece of the cart and they're flying through still Nebraska air like they're the only thing that's moving. Sam smiles, _laughs_ , because they are going, they are moving, and they are free.

Down a hill. Relief, because that means they're not going to hit anyone's car and Dad's not going to give them hell. Then vague realization dawns: What _are_ they going to hit?

Sandbags, hard-packed, layered one atop the other. Keeping the hill from falling into the street. Sam imagines it'll do the same to them and the shopping cart. They'll break like rocks into sand, a million glittering pieces. Dean imagines similarly, because he's shouting at Sam, _JUMP_. The cart is going too fast, and it is too high, and Sam is too small for this.

Thing is, he can't. Stuck like an animal in a cage. Dean can, though. He can slide right out and it's not that far to the ground, for him.

"You _made_ it like this," Sam accuses. 

Dean replies, JUMP!

_JUMP!_

But Sam doesn't jump and neither does Dean and they hit the sandbag barrier at an awkward angle and the cart does a somersault. Sam loses track of everything, just hangs onto the cart like a sticky burr and screams, I hate you I hate you I hate you I--

"-- _hate_ you!" The cart slides to a horizontal stop with Sam still in it. He's pretty sure his fingers are frozen in their tangled grip.

Dean is lying at the base of the sandbags, scrambling in the dust like an overturned beetle. Sam's screams turn to wet, wavering condemnations. _I hate you I hate you I hate you._

You okay, Sammy? Yeah, they're both okay. They're okay. Dean doesn't pry Sam from the cart 'til Sam's good and ready, and he takes the climb back to the parking lot like he's got thirty-one years to do it and keeps making a face like someone's sliced him in half. _I hate you I hate you I hate you_ , Sam grinds out at every step, until it's habit and comes naturally. "I _hate_ you."

They are silent an hour for every time he said it. If Dad notices, in between throwing things into the trunk and making an exit that seems speedier than should be legal, he doesn't think it strange. But Dean surprises _Sam_ when he doesn't want to go out and eat.

Dad's treat for leaving them in the car all day, and Dean's not hungry, he says. Sam is secretly elated, because he hates Boston Market (and hates that it's not in Boston, ever), but he's happier when his curiosity is sated. 

When Dad hits a gas station, Sam hits Dean.

Dean yelps a little (even though Sam made a point of not hitting him too hard), slaps Sam's hand back half-heartedly. "What the hell was that for! Oh, let me guess. You hate me.

"Why? _You're_ not the one that faceplanted into a wall because his idiot brother wouldn't jump like he told him to."

He couldn't, Sam objects. 

Well, he got in didn't he? He jumps down entire stairwells at Bobby's; how was this different?

"I hate you."

"Yeah, you keep saying that. _Why?_ We were having fun. And then I was trying to save you, but I guess you don't wanna be saved--I could have left you at the bottom of that hill--"

Sam's face is hot. His eyes prickle. "Why do you keep asking me why? I was scared! I was _scared_ , okay?"

Dean looks away.

Sam looks away, too. "That's why I kept saying--"

Sam writes his name in the condensation on the window, even though Dad always says not to. Then he writes WAL*MART and SEARS. "I thought you knew that."

\--Then Sam opens his eyes. It is hot and wet under the blankets. So it had been a lonely dream, as well as a lonely waking up. He had been with Dean the entire time, and even Dad was mostly there, and he'd still been alone. Alien. 

Like a monster in a cage.

 

**zombies (i).**

 

Dad asks for a table at the back of Rita's Diner, away from the windows if possible. It's not fear or active paranoia, just habit. Dean is given full freedom of the menu and placed under house arrest until Dad comes back to front the bill.

Then Dad disappears back into the black and smoke and neon of the Stagecoach Casino and takes his guns and his ghosts with him. Dean is just a kid on a trip to Cali, sitting in a diner while his dad hits the bar, then the tables. They have to win back their fifty, after all, and Beatty is strictly cash-only unless it turns out they're gonna be here longer than twelve hours. There's only so many identities you can steal, you know? And credit fraud's not easy. Dean knows that. He knows there's a reason for everything Dad does.

He does.

But the practicality of all this doesn't take the edge off the dejection that starts in from Dean's extremities and pools in his chest. It's clear to him that his role in this whole ordeal is over, which invites a new tangibility to the whole 'it's the journey, not the destination' deal. He'll sit here, Dad'll do his job. Then they'll leave. And nothing will have changed. It's just. He thought--

He got on the plane because Dad said _jump_ ; orders are orders. But he'd lived through it because Dad said jump _with me_. 

He'd just thought maybe...

They'd seen evil, sharp as the scorch of fire and the wrenching losses it incurred. Evil's preemptive strike, and John Winchester had risen to the challenge, learned to fight back. And he'd in turn taught his children how to run. In Dean's case, defend (because some things can't be unseen). But not to attack, to fight. Never to fight.

Until--well. Maybe it's like Sammy getting overexcited at Christmas. And Easter, and the Fourth of July. It's like maybe there's that one thing left you're allowed to have, and it turns out it's nothing but cig smoke and bar mirrors.

Dean drags his mind from dangerous places and focuses on the menu. 

Wet fries. 

Sounds unlikely to disappoint his expectations. Dean likes that about food. Wet fries; two orders. And a Coke.

"Waiting for your daddy?" asks the waitress. She's Dad's age and kind of squishy, like Sam's teacher in that one school in Utah last month. Venus. This woman's name is Rita. Possibly even the Rita of Rita's Diner.

Dean nods stiffly. As a rule, whatever people assume of you is true, so long as it's nothing criminal. Whatever their brain's cooking up, it's a hundred percent more airtight than anything you can throw their way. He's waiting for Dad. He didn't just forget that his little brother didn't come with, and, in the case of Sammy's absence, he did _not_ just decide to down both himself.

As it turns out Rita's really not that curious, because she scribbles something down on her pad and doesn't come back for a million years. Not even with the Coke. And Dean's driving himself so crazy with the _not_ thinking that maybe when the levee breaks and there's no stopping the fear and the disappointment and resentment from eating into everything, there'll be nothing left hasn't been disassembled already.

When he closes his eyes, all he can see is Beech Duchess staring, and Dad's back as he walks away again. Dean's hands work in place of his mind.

House made out of coasters, napkins, and the beverage card.

Catapult made out of a spoon and hot sauce bottle.

A pilfered salt shaker, slid deep into the left pocket of Dad's jacket.

Dean fingers the roll of quarters as he draws his hand back out. They snap against each other decisively.

When Rita rounds back toward him: "My dad came by when you were gone. He told me to order him a...Zombie." It has orange juice in it and a cherry on top, which is kind of girly, but it's _got_ to be mostly rum and he doesn't need to be French to say it, so it all works out.

"Sure he did, kid."

Dean doesn't know if it's harder or easier to lie with Sammy gone. Sam's got a face that matronly types like Rita can't say no to, but he's also got a face that says ' _Dean_ , that's wrong and we're not supposed to do that' like it's done up in neon lights. Probably an even split. Rita's reaction wasn't a surprise either way, but he'd kind of hoped she'd said something more interesting. How dare you pull that kind of shit, young man, how has your father _raised_ you?--that kind of thing.

But Rita comes swinging through the kitchen doors with what looks like two baskets of french fries swimming in gravy, which is just as good.

She plunks a tall glass filled with something orange down in front of him, which isn't Coke, and isn't swimming in gravy.

"If he didn't want you getting into trouble, he'd be here watchin' you, right?"

 

**zombies (ii).**

 

They pay in quarters.

Rita doesn't know if it's suspicious or endearing or if she should be used to it by now; Stagecoach's got slots, after all. But this kid's old man just doesn't seem the type to waste his time on the low-stakes, low-pay machines the county restrictions enforce (they want to keep 'em coming back, not running home stone cold broke).

It’s the kid first, which almost makes sense. An allowance he’s been saving up all summer, maybe. Cheating himself of nickel candy every weekend, so he could come all the way out to Beatty and buy himself a nice, tall Zombie. Or maybe that’s a little too nostalgic, a little too sepia-toned—her friends tell her she’s a romantic mess. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore. Kids like him are having sex in the back seat of Daddy’s car by now, and jacking off since they were four. That’s what her friends say. Her friends watch TNT and she watches Hallmark and neither grouping has seen further than the occasional trip to Vegas, maybe a car ride out to Hell’s Gate, if the gas isn’t being rationed and they can afford the luxury. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, but back when she did—two, three months, an eternity ago—old Simon Walker was so stingy he wouldn’t even let her roll the windows down.

Air res- _ist_ -ance, he snapped, viper-like. Take it from me. Air res- _ist_ -ance.

Kid has that same kind of vexed, strangled look she caught on her own face when she scowled into Simon Walker’s flawless righthand rear-view, sweaty and unconvinced. That's why she serves him the drink.

It's more orange juice than rum, not a true Zombie in the least, but the kid takes a sip from the amateurish straw Rita so kindly supplied, and she watches as the vindictiveness drains from his features fast as the drink slides out of his mouth and back down the straw. He takes up a handful of wet fries and uses them like cotton swabs, sweeping all the places where that rum taste hangs and sticks.

"You boys come in an airplane?" Rita's off duty as of half an hour ago. It's a reasonable institution, closes at three. She gestures toward the second helping of wet fries, _may I?_ and the kid shrugs, conveys acquiescence through simple apathy.

"What's it to you?"

Well-guarded, for a kid. In the ballpark of ten, she guesses. "Sure as hell didn't walk all the way out here. And didn't come in a truck, 'less you're planning on moving in. You saw old Andrew Kimmel out there with his crap-haul collection, of course. Doesn't give those back, even if you pay him a million dollars. They're his babies now, and he'll love them better'n you ever did."

Kid looks like he begs to differ. "Car's locked up in Minnesota," he concedes.

Not exactly the big mystery Rita was aiming to unveil. "And the plane wasn't?"

That shuts him up quick. So there's definitely something up with that plane. Drug traffickers, maybe. Just a stolen plane (but what thief could fly a thing like that?). Flying to Mexico? What's Minnesota known for?

Fortune's worth of soft-ore iron in the cockpit, waiting to be restored to Tenochtitlan. _Apologies; we don't have any gold, but take this here iron, because it's the next best thing, harder than gold, and more useful. This is the future._

Rita's not staking a claim to realism, here. She's not much of a dreamer, in the manufacture-and-engineering sense. But if something doesn't ever leave her head, might as well make it nice and fancy. "Hey, you got a name? I need to write you up in the guest book, and your dad didn't give me jack."

"Not really."

Which is a nothing answer if she ever heard one. No ragtag's going to give her lip (because where's Daddy? Rita's not too keen on babysitting, even if she's fostered a sullen little camaraderie between them, what with the drink). Not past three am, and not in her diner. "Kid, whatever you and your daddy done, or whatever you're scared of, there ain't nothing more you oughta be afraid of 'cept me."

 

\--

 

Lady shouldn't have said that.

She has no right to pry. She's just a waitress in a diner in a fucked up little town, and he tells her in as many words. She says he's got a pretty ornate vocabulary for a ten-year old, and "I'm _nine_ ," just doesn't seem like the greatest comeback.

Dean hates doing this alone. Not the lying; that's par for the course. Besides, he's a learned hand--been lying since he was four. _I didn't hear any scraping outside. You're stupid. Stop looking at that stupid Tailypo book and go to sleep already_. (Been a year and a half since then. It was the first time Dad leaves them alone, not at Uncle Bobby's, or Pastor Jim's or even Caleb's. And it's around midnight when Dean realizes that he does not know what he's going to do, some dark clawed thing from Sammy's storybook--and Dad's research; uncanny how books can lead such double lives--splinters through that door. Cans on an old fence don't have claws, aren't posed to kill.)

It's different, now. Year and a half's a long time. Hell, it's been fifteen hours and Dean's pretty sure he's not the person he was when they left Minnesota. He's moving with a ragged, twisted kind of fear roaming godless in his stomach, and no matter what he does to knock it out, it comes up. It comes up, and he'd rather be staring down a tailypo than sit here being stared down by Rita, because this? This is like sitting on the edge of the bed while Sam tosses under the sheets. This is like knowing what he needs to do but knowing just as strong that time comes, he's not sure how to do it.

Only Sam's not here.

Dean tries to breathe as evenly as possible, and occupies himself with spinning the Zombie on the table, fingertips numb and tall orange glass making a wet snail trail across the Formica. He doesn't like being saved, but he really _wishes_ \--

That Dad would come. He wants to call out and have Dad drop whatever and come running, but you don't cry wolf unless you don't want saving when it counts. He doesn't think Dad quite understands this (and Dean doesn't either, not really--not yet), but there's a thousand things that can slip past salt, just _eating_ at his boys, and he probably couldn't save them if he tried. 

Then Dad swings in through the doors like the world's timetable functions according to his say-so. A little drunk, but Dean can tell from Dad's crooked grin a whole lot richer. He counts quarters out of Dean's pocket and pays for the meal, then tips a twenty. Dean's eyes are saucers.

A _whole_ lot richer. 

If Dad notices the conspicuous glowstick of a drink he doesn't care. They burn out of Rita's Diner and the Stagecoach Casino as haphazardly as they came, stopping for no one and saying nothing. Phoenix's a good place to hole up for the night; complimentary continental breakfast every morning except Sundays from six to ten thirty.

 

\--

 

Kid gets swept up in a hurry, even though Rita knows for a fact they're on a fast track to all places nowhere. One of those things that just seals how strange the two would-be tourists really are. But they'd been sitting tight at that table for a full ten minutes before the kid's old man materialized, and for all the stoic bravado she put up with, she knows what she saw.

Fear.

She knows the look all too well.

 

**poor boy on rye.**

 

Next stop, Rebel Gas. Door makes a pinging sound and the gas station is familiar territory, same on the inside as everywhere. He almost tells Dean to grab a sandwich from the coolers in the back, before he remembers kid's been fed. The fluorescent lights cast the world in an unflattering greenish hue. Dean looks like death; he's been fluctuating between that and passably colored all day. John probably doesn't look much better, which explains the startled squeal the cashier supplies when John starts barking orders at him. 

Need some fuel, got a Beech Duchess out west about two miles. "Drive me and my boy out and we'll help you to help us guide her back."

The Beatty cardsharks are real fine folk, as they call themselves, and the Phoenix may be a real fine family establishment, as they call _it_ , but John's also pretty sure at least one of them, Benton Southerly, is a shareholder for said fine family establishment, and as such has quite the investment in Phoenix's financial success. Gas and go is the Winchester way; he wants to be in California by sun up, and he still has an airplane to exorcise. Apparently. He's gonna have _words_ with Jim, that's for fucking sure.

"And I need to borrow your phone."

The cashier, a starchy oily kind of kid, wipes his hands down the front of his apron nervously. "No phone. Well, no _working_ phone, I mean. I meant to--well. Never mind. And gas doesn't come in 'til tomorrow night. Sir. And--uh. Management prohibits line-forming before dinnertime, so um. Can I--can I get you anything else, maybe?" Kid gives John a deer-like stare, like he's deciding whether he should bolt or not, and John makes a note to act a little more civilian. He's not the sort who enjoys unexpected detours--even though the California's kelpies aren't exactly going anywhere--and he's not the sort who plays nice with the locals when there's no need to befriend them.

But if they're laid up here for another eighteen hours, he may need to rethink that angle. "That so?"

"Yessir. Air Force's been delivering our ration every month on their way out to Nellis, so you're in luck. We've been dry nearly a week, now."

"Bad for business?"

"Tell me about it. Government tourist ploy, you ask me. Everyone holes up at the motherfucking Phoenix and doesn't pay the mini mart a second glance. They go for that 'authentic' mercantile store and whatever. Gas stations just aren't unique enough. I'll show _them_ goddamn unique!"

Everyone in the immediate vicinity of this town is flipping their shit over something or another. But if kitschy tourist traps are making headlines, it's time for the Winchesters to get out. Gasoline and no speed limit seem long overdue. John clicks his tongue sympathetically and asks the cashier to do him a Poor Boy. They'll be back for the gas, so they'll be seeking out the Phoenix like everyone else, seems like. The cashier wanders over to the coolers and pulls out a sandwich wrapped in butcher paper, ready-made. In the meantime, John helps himself to a copy of every tourist brochure at the checkout counter.

He asks Dean if he wants anything. Kid's been so quiet it's almost eerie--just disappears into the dust and nothing of the town. He looks thoroughly exhausted of any interest in their goings-on whatsoever. He shrugs.

"Suit yourself." John plucks a bag of jacks--iron--from the impulse-buy jars and throws it on top his pamphlet pile, because it seems like a normal, tourist kind of thing to do. The rubber ball has "The Silver State" smeared onto it.

"...There a place I can buy some rock salt?" Not a normal tourist thing to say.

"Beatty Mercantile opens tomorrow at ten. More or less. Sometimes more like ten thirty. We're open 24/7."

So John sees.

They check into a room at the Phoenix, with nothing in hand but a battered old duffel, a Poor Boy, and a bag of jacks. The desk clerk looks at them like they're either the unfortunate recipients of the worst package tour in the world, or they're about to turn the town on its head with what they've got in that bag. John isn't sure which description is more apt.

 

\--

 

The Phoenix is just clean enough to make Dean feel dirty. The floor is pine, not yet sanded, so everything smells a little unfinished. The walls are much the same, with some pictures of old timey Beatty during the Silver Rush. It looks a lot like the Beatty they just walked through, only in black and white. Dad's already spread his stuff all across the bed and started organizing it into some system Dean doesn't try to understand on the best of days. The ritual makes Dad's plans for the night blazingly self-evident. Dad's gone to work.

The single-minded tenacity doesn't faze Dean particularly; it's starting to be more and more commonplace, this past year. Four months, they'd stay in the same place, be almost normal. Have an apartment. Neighbors. School. Just long enough to be forced to get used to it--do the homework, play nice in the school yard (or don't play at all, which was often the case), put down roots, or go crazy just... _floating._

Then they'd leave, and they wouldn't stop moving. Back seat of the Impala is okay for the night if you've got enough laundry to make a nest of it. Sam frets in his car seat, and Dean presses his feet to the plastic siding and tries not to fall off as they plunge forward indefinitely. Tries to sleep.

You wake up and finally, the car's stopped moving. Pulled into a turnout somewhere a lot like the town you left, but there's mountains in the horizon weren't there before, and that's probably the end of Cleerbrook Elementary and Miss Susie and Johnny-who-wants-the-world-to-know- _his_ -dad-got-him-an-Indiana-Jones-hat.

Dean's Dad bought him a bag of jacks. He drops them on the bed in front of Dean on his way to the bathroom. "Here."

"Thanks," is Dean's automatic reply, though his tone belies his lack of enthusiasm. Jacks is a girls' game. And besides, Dean doesn't know how to play. 

"--going to have to work, 'stead of salt." 

Oh.

He only catches the tail-end of Dad's instructions, but they're just as self-evident as the rainbow of pamphlets commandeering the bedsheets. Funny how routine life is, no matter who you are.

Lay salt down before you go to bed. Lay iron, if it's the best you got. Of course.

Jacks in hand, Dean surveys the pamphlets as he rounds the bed to the door. (No windows, at least, which is a perk.)

Rhyolite, Jewel of the Silver Rush. Goldwell Open Air Museum. Nellis Air Force Base. The Powder Horn. In another pile: Brothel, Sourdough Saloon, Marta Becket’s Amargosa Opera House.

What an awful place. Sammy'd probably get his panties in a bunch with that open air museum, though. He'd taken a bizarre interest in things like that. Then he'd talk about it for the next eight hundred miles, to every waitress, gas man, or store clerk who enquired, like he went there all the time, or like he lived there or something.

"Hop in the shower, Dean. Make it look less like I kidnapped you." Which made it sound like he had.

And in a sense it is true. Dean doesn't have any place here--not yet. He's getting the idea that maybe this is changing, and maybe it has to do with getting older, but his place should really be back in Blue Earth with Pastor Jim. Or lying in the back of the Impala, while Dad’s on a hunt.

With Sam.

Yet here he is. And here Sam isn’t.

 

\--

 

Dean finally falls asleep just after four, washed hair plastered to his forehead and seeping wetness into the pillow. Bits of sawdust are caught up in everything already, yellow-white. Out of habit, he keeps to one side of the mattress, though tonight he's got a queen to himself. The pillow's fluffed and the sheets are turned out, ready for someone else to climb in.

Looks too empty that way.

John heaves himself up off the adjacent bed, careful not to jog the stacks of tourist pamphlets overmuch, rounds the frame, and tucks the sheets and blankets and cover back like they were before, like no one had been there at all.

He needs to make a call. 

Out in the hall, there's a pay phone. John uses the last of the quarters and dials 507.

"Hey, uh. Laid up in town called Beatty, Nevada. Didn't ask before, but given the circumstances I think it's best I know what the story is behind this plane. Where you got it, what you did with it, why it's going to California. Interesting message playing on the radio. So that's it. I'll try you again in a coupla hours. And.

"Say hi to Sammy for Dean and me."

The phone clicks into its holster, and without the static buzz of Pastor Jim's answering machine, the hall is silent. 

Half past four. 6:30 in Blue Earth, then. Not that early, but maybe not late enough. 

Today is Sunday; service at ten, instead of seven. Maybe it's too early after all. He'll try again in a few hours.

It's nothing to worry about.

 

**flight.**

 

Cold floor. It's not something he's used to. The motels Dad arranged usually had carpet of some sort, often thin, and always that toxic shade of green, no matter the state.

Falling out of bed is not something he's used to, because the motels Dad arranged always had big, big beds; he'd share with Dean and it would still feel empty. But thinking of that makes him remember the dream, and something in his stomach twists like fear, like longing, and like hope (which feels a little bit like both).

Dad's not going to call. He didn't last night, never has before. That Dean is with him now changes nothing. All it means is that for the first time since memory, Sam's inside feeling matches his outside.

Maybe it's better like this.

Sam can hear the buzz and hum of people and motion and people in motion as it reverberates up the stairwell. But Sam wants to be alone (but he doesn't--he doesn't even know. He wants to be someone other than himself, so he doesn't have to answer that question. He wants to be Dean, so he doesn't know the question exists.

Dad's on business. We're staying here; we're moving. We're Al and Luc, Jonathan and Nate. Sal and Kelly. We're _us_ , and we are everything life throws at us).

No, it's better like this.

It _is_. It has to be. Things match up, and that's when they're whole. And Sam's old enough to know that a child-seat in the back of a car like Dad's; kids holed up in a musty room, and his brother perched on the bed with a rifle slung across his lap while Sam pretends to sleep; kids not running around in some yard, squirting each other with Nerf guns? These things don't match.

This is the kind of thing Dean watches on TV, when he clicks past the Brady Bunch and the Wonder Years and settles on Airwolf and Knight Rider. It's always right in television, because everyone's a team player and they look out for each other in the end.

Obviously, the same logic does not apply. Seeing as Dad and Dean are in California. And he is in Blue Earth.

Sam digs himself up from the wood floor, an avalanche of sheets and quilts piled up atop him. The beads-- _rosary_ , Pastor Jim called it--are still on the coffee table, half-hidden under a wayward pillow. Sam shoves them into the pocket of his pajamas and tries to find a stool. He's going to pull down the stairs to the attic, he's going to climb, and he's not going to come back down until he's stopped missing everyone. 

The missing makes him feel forgotten.

He earns himself a mouthful of dust as he heaves himself up onto the attic floor and worms his legs up behind him. 

It is 6:30 am. He hears the phone's first ring, a kind of rickety, timid sound, and pulls up the attic door in a hurry, latches it tight. The phone and the people and everything fall silent, and Sam smiles.

It's just him now. Sam and the other lost things in the attic.

There's not much up there from what he can see (admittedly, also not much; but there's a round window and an emergency flash light in a tub by the ladder hatch). Everything is neatly boxed and labeled and stored, overall well cared for but unlikely to ever move from this place, barring a fire or a tornado. There's probably a place for him up here. 

Upon closer inspection, Sam finds a graying drift of salt brushed over the glass sealant on the window.

Not that again. Anything but that.

There's a tree and a flagging kitestring right out the window. In lieu of his matched-up self, Sam does something he's never before dared.

He puts his thumb to the windowsill and clears a nice, straight path right through the salt line.

It feels a little like winning.


	3. Chapter 3

**satan in a sunday suit (i).**

 

It's Sunday, of course. No complimentary breakfast. It's Sunday, and nothing opens until after lunch, because everyone in town has flocked to Beatty's neapolitan selection of churches--Latter Day Saints, Southern Baptist, the vague (Unitarian Universalist, maybe) "Community" Church. 

Truthfully, John has half a mind to sit Dean in the back of one of the services and leave the kid there until he has everything sorted out. But he can't, _knows_ he can't, because there isn't a decent suburban father in the country that'd do that; and they have a cover to keep. 

So he leaves Dean at The Phoenix instead. Don't answer the door, don't leave the room, and don't make too much noise.

Of all the possible downsides to taking Dean along, _people_ as a source of the worst thus far? He hadn't considered that. By the time the day's out, they're going to need at least a name and a hometown, and John can't remember who they were last night, with Andrew Kimmel. 

No one makes much of a fuss when a lone man blows into town guarded and singular, and partial to people who were much the same. He could be any number of things; doesn't matter. Long as he's not stirring up an overabundance of trouble (and even if he is, so long as he gets gone when he knows he's overstayed his welcome) he's a ghost. Man dragging along a kid-- _then_ he's a person. And people need stories to keep them living, even more than they need them to keep the dead down.

John's been tailing the proprietor of Beatty Mercantile since the Southern Baptist service let out. He waits a respectable couple minutes before he swings through the door. The door closes behind him, and he's not John Winchester anymore.

 

\--

 

The town is as unnerving by daylight as it is by night. A little Mayberry, a little Stepford. Dean's about twelve paces from the front door of their room at The Phoenix before he gets accosted by someone from the tourism bureau named Jim Beatty. And yes, his last name _does_ match the town's! 

He's so glad Dean noticed.

Dean mentally reiterates last night’s lamentation. What a _god_ awful place. But anywhere is better than sitting in the room, throwing jacks at the wall and wishing Sam could be there to annoy him. At least that'd give him something to do.

With Sam gone, there's no reason Dean shouldn't leave the stupid room. Something comes to kill him--whatever's out there, in the sky, or the electrics, or the whole damn town--and it can do so just as easy at The Phoenix as it can on the street. He knows that much.

Besides, the town's got a collective population of what feels like just over twelve. And no one under the age of Old. If there were any axe murderers in the mix, they'd have been weeded out of a town like this a long time ago. Any monsters, and they'd all be dead. Nothing doing.

Jim's quite the character, though. Real nice, as far as people go. Kind of a space cadet (space _lieutenant_ , actually) but he's not so bad. Kind of like Sam, only easier to fool and not as frowny all the time. Point in case, Dean has never seen someone smile so much in his life--be so proud of his little town, his home. 

Dean vaguely remembers 'home' and he doesn't remember ever being really proud of it. Maybe he should have been. Maybe he should have been, when he had the chance. But it's hard to be proud of wood and paint and foundation if you don't know it's going to burn to the ground. 

Vaguely, he wonders if Jim knows something they don't.

"You know what I think? 'S that if people just wandered in, they'd come around real nice and settle down to live here. You think you're going to live here, kid?"

Dean shrugs. Sure, why not. He's not really following the slough of words that Jim keeps pouring forth. He doesn't really want to be told about the Gold Rush and the glory days and the way Rita wants to open up her own little museum of local history (complete with true-to-life old mining relics!) _again_. He doesn't really want to talk to _any_ one. But Jim Beatty's smiling at him like he's just won the lottery, so he shrugs. 

Sure, why not.

"See, I told you people'd come around! And they'd love it. And here you are! You're going to love it, I just know. I just know!"

 

**who's old jim? (i)**

 

Richard Fainall nods to the shopkeeper. He has the clothes on his back and the kid in his room and, apparently, an airplane out in the bush. He and his wife are recently separated, but he's taking his boy to a baseball game in California, where his family's from. Wife's back in Milwaukee and she's expecting them to call, so it'd be nice if he could just borrow the telephone. It'll be quick.

(Clarisse Fainall does indeed have a place in Milwaukee--got a yard and even a view of the church. It's three feet across and six feet deep. A little snug, but not bad for Milwaukee.)

Beatty Mercantile allows him use of the phone anyway. "Hey, it's me. Pete and I got laid up in town called Beatty. It's in Nevada. Plane's acting up--ask Jim where it came from, alright?

"Three days. I promised."

Answering machine. John ever gets a phone, he's going to answer it even if it kills him. He hates leaving messages. If he wanted to talk at himself, he'd have sent a damn post card.

"Three days, huh?" Beatty Mercantile pipes up. He's older than John but younger than Richard Fainall; balding, and from the looks of it, proud of the fact. "You might wanna buy some flowers or something, 'cause the ex-misses ain't gonna be happy."

"Oh?"

"Lots of people planning to up and leave, is all. You're gonna have to fight for that fuel."

That's almost never a good thing to hear. Entire populations don't generally get a hankering to move in droves, like sheep, or cattle to the slaughter. John inquires as to why.

"Old town. Business a little slow, I'm sure you noticed. Everyone's just tryin' to leave--it'll be like Rhyolite up north soon enough. Just a bunch of empty buildings and the ghosts that live in 'em. Everyone else'll be gone, 'cept for old Jim."

An anomaly. That's absolutely never a good thing to hear.

"Who's old Jim?"

 

\--

 

How amazing would this be, if nothing ever changed? How amazing how amazing how amazing. You could be anything you wanted and you wouldn't have to worry. You'd be safe and nothing would get taken away from you, and you wouldn't have to pick up the pieces and throw them out, because they don't fit together no more.

How amazing would this be?

"Pretty amazing."

Jim's really not liking his, what does Rita call it, when she's talking to that Simon character--this _noncommittal_ attitude. That's not impressive at all! He hop-skips, takes the kid by the collar of his jacket and tries to twirl him around.

Kid, feet firmly rooted in the dirt, knees locked and pockets filled with hands, doesn't move with his top half and spins out. Hits the ground like a rubber ball and rolls back upright, ends up crouched like a sprinter on the starting blocks. Two hundred yard; Jim did that once, in school. First place. He was the only boy in his grade.

Now _that's_ impressive. Jim tells him so.

"What the hell is wrong with you!" And he's mad, and that's not good. Rita tells him it's not good. Gets empty mugs (and sometimes full mugs) thrown at him, he's not careful. Rita's not good when she's mad. She calls him an invisible devil and throws things at him (mostly misses, but sometimes it hurts). 

But this little boy can't hurt him, not like Rita. He doesn't own a diner, so he doesn't _have_ any mugs.

Jim holds his hand out. He's sorry, so sorry. Not really, but he'll say it if it makes the kid feel better. "Let me help you up!"

Kid takes his hand, albeit grudgingly--and it's so funny how people will do that, like they can't decide whether they're supposed to want help or not--and from the looks of it, he goes up and up and _up_ , his eyes get so big.

Jim stands him up like he's playing with the old mannequins in Beatty Mercantile, or Gloria Tanner's lace and dress sale comes around summertime. Kid falls to the ground like a soggy shirt, and his whole self looks white and clammy, against the brown dry of the road.

"Y--you, _what_ \--"

Jim wishes the kid would look at him again. He wants another look at those great big shiny saucer eyes of his.

 

**satan in a sunday suit (ii).**

 

It was like having his heart grabbed, instead of his hand. Stomach torn out. Vertical climb, and the spiraling vertigo that comes after. Everything, everything all at once. Dean's fingers dig into the dirt and it's comfortingly warm before it turns _hot hot hot_ and it's all he can do to just keep forcing air through his lungs both ways; his breath just hitches and it's up and up and _up_ like panic.

His whole self freezes from the inside out and he's sprawled in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere in the middle of August.

He's going to throw up. He's got that sick feeling that comes from not having any more working parts left, and he's going to throw them all up--stomach, lungs, intestines, all of it--because he hasn't even eaten anything yet (he can't believe it's the _food_ he thought was lethal).

"What are you--?" he shouts, though it's really more of a tea kettle whine, it sounds so thin and reedy and pathetic. _What did you do?_

That's the kind of question you can't ask, you can't because it doesn't ever get answered it's the kind you gotta figure out--but that's Dad's turf, not his, all he's gotta do is keep Sammy safe and _oh god, Sammy._

No, he's in Minnesota. Hundreds of miles away. He's good.

And Jim's just staring at him like the buffoon he is and Dean is really, really-- _not_ going to dry-retch, because he's gotta make sure Sammy's--no, he got left. Sammy got left. He's good, he's fine, he doesn't need to be worried about he's good. Either that or Dean got _taken_ , and he's the one in the wrong spot, not Sammy. 

Dean doesn't know what to he think so he just says: " _Do_ not _touch me again._ " He pushes the words out with the air and hopes to god he doesn't suck any back in, too. Jim jumps back. He's looking at him like he's a really interesting little sideshow. Bastard.

You can't stay here if you're gonna do stuff like that these are my rules you have to get gone you're gonna be like that _where'd all the fire come from (and why_ can't he look back)? Because he does and it _hurts_ , it really hurts, like a blow to the ribs, and everything shatters until he's looking at himself sideways. He's holding a gun he knows how to work but he doesn't know how to use, and lying out of his ass to Sammy about everything because at least this way, they die? Sammy'll never know what hit him--not like the ground that's rising up to meet them as Dad tries to fly that death trap Beech Duchess _that's_ real and Dean can see it, feel the pain fracture through the--wire shopping cart lying bent against a wall of sandbags, and him feeling worse than bent _I hate you I hate you I hate you._ That's what this is, that's exactly it, Sammy _you're not here_ but you're right, you're always going to be right.

This? This is fear. Not of Jim, though. Right? That'd be stupid. There's something-- It's-- _God_ , why is he so stupid? and when did he stop listening to Dad?

He tries to breathe out deep and he can feel tears pool like hot wax in his eyes. Hecan'tbreathehecan'tbreathe he _cannot panic_. He--

He just--

 _It's gonna be okay._ It'll all be perfect and lovely because it's Beatty--or your money back. _It's gonna be okay._

It's really, really not. Dean has his forehead pressed to the road, concentrates on expelling breaths in out in out into the dirt and coherence right along with them. He can't breathe because his stomach's clogging up his airway. Just hitched in his throat, full of tickling writhing things and if he could just--

_Just--_

He feels lanky arms wrap around him, and everything locks in. Redoubles. Short circuit like an overstimulated radio. "'S gonna be okay. I'll take you to Rita's. Rita's real nice, she'll fix you up. Free ice cream, you went to Sunday School today. Free ice cream is the best."

Nerves, muscles, _bones._ Everything's screaming. It's the noise pain makes, panic makes, at a fever-pitch. He can feel Jim Beatty's embrace like it's breaking every part of him and good intentions have never hurt this bad. It is _not_ okay.

Everything dies.

_It's gonna be okay._

And he's really alone. 

_It's gonna be okay._

His arms aren't there, his legs. His insides are seeping out like sweat, Dad's on business, and Sammy's just gone, gone and if Dean had arms left, he'd be reaching out for that whiny, three-foot security but he's gone he's gone he's gone and this is it, this's the end he just-- 

He just.

He needs to be Dad's son.

They are not like everyone else; everyone else hasn't seen the things they've--hasn't even dreamed of the things they know like other people know Friday night movies and Christmas trips to Grandma's.

They can beat this. He can beat this. He just needs to. He needs to do something. (But what can he do?) He just needs to find his pocket. Rita's real nice; she'll fix him right up. Dean has a bit of Rita's salt in his pocket, left from the night before. It's nothing, _nothing_ and it's not going to save him, but he just--

Needs to breathe. He'll run, he'll limp, he'll crawl, he'll just fall right where Jim drops him and he won't get up. He'll lay there like a bird struck by lightning. He doesn't care. 

Just needs to breathe.

Fifty miles away and seven years later, his fingers close around something cold and ridged and round.

He smashes it against another something--it's hard, he doesn't know what, but it's hard; the glass shatters and Jim shrieks and Dean crashes.

He's supposed to run, now. Propel his body forward through sheer force of will, because he has to, he doesn't have any choice. Thing in Jim--or maybe the thing Jim _is_ \--is gonna shake it off, and if Dean's not out, thing's for sure gonna kill him then.

Jim is mewling nonsense: You hit me with that bottle you hit me with you bled me with _killing me_ with what is this, salt? Why you got salt in your pocket, thief--Rita's gonna hurt you 'cause you hurt me--

Dean's looking up at Jim, and Jim's looking back with a confused, betrayed tinge to the edges and angles that make his face. It's not angry. Not vengeful. Not anything like it should be. Blood drips from the bridge of Jim's nose into Dean's face, into the dirt.

Lot of blood. 

Head wound means a lot of blood, you got a real body. He knocked Sam in the head with the back door of the Impala once. Sam was just barely walking and what with the way he fell back and screeched, it was like his whole head was getting cut in half, there was so much blood. That wasn't such a good day.

Today isn't such a good day.

They're still in the middle of the road in the middle of town, and the sun's out and it's a Sunday afternoon in August, and even though Jim's screaming bloody murder no one's coming. Ghosts don't hurt, don't bleed. Ghouls don't panic. But people never hurt like that, they grab you. Not like that, Dean doesn't think.

Thinking is hard.

Dean feels the vindictive prick of rock and road shrapnel score the back of his skull and the underside of his arms as he makes a half-hearted attempt to move. _You run. You take your brother, and you run. Don't look back._

But it's pretty good right here, too. Not so bad, in any case. Just gonna stay right here.

_It's gonna be okay._

 

**courage (i)**

 

John Winchester and the John Winchester that might have been have one thing in common: both knew this day would come.

John always knew someday he'd see his sons laid out, grounded by a rogue pitch, breath snapped out of lungs like air from a popping balloon. A baseball, or something darker, it doesn't matter. His first impulse is the same--to run out from the stands and into the outfield, scoop up his child, throw everything else to the wind.

And his actions are the same.

Stay in the dugout, don't budge; betray nothing. Don't even look at Dean.

He's got a job to do. Maybe he's a father, and he's got to let his kid start lining up his own gigs. Mary's in the stands next to him keeping him down by the seat of his pants, telling him not to coddle their children; not right now. Maybe he's a hunter, and it's spirits first, damage-tallying later. It changes nothing. His actions are the same.

But the John Winchester that might have been probably doesn't pull a .45 from his bag of groceries--rock salt, a gallon of water--and aim it at the offending Little Leaguer.

"These are consecrated rounds, Jim, so you step away from my boy right now."

When Old Jim turns his head up toward him, John's a little relieved to find that the blood painting the road burnt red isn't Dean's. "This is rock salt, and this is about to be holy water. Got a silver knife and I know how to throw it straight. Got more than enough to keep you hurting."

Dean rolls onto his hands and knees, and he's folded into himself the way he used to curl into a corner of his crib at night, a lifetime ago. Something in John flares up, an old familiar guilty disgusting feeling, and John banishes it away along with the unsolicited memories.

John can see his heaving shoulders and the way the dust billows out from under him with every exhalation, and he knows that's as far as Dean's going to get for a while yet.

He releases the safety. "Don't test me."

Old Jim splits from Dean, fast as smiling. He's babbling something about guns and help! and POLICE! and for a moment, John's concentration wavers. His thought process skids and slides, off balance.

What _is_ this thing?

It's evil. One look at Dean, and he knows it is. But honestly...? Seems a lot like the scared fool doesn't know what he's done wrong. John's not sure what the thing is pulling, but with the way he's screeching and hollering, this probably isn't going to end well.

John resigns himself to yet another setback. This is why he hates going in blind--learning by trial and error tends to get people maimed, killed, or incarcerated.

Member of Beatty's police is just coming down the lane with a birdlike young lady--making wedding plans, from the way John hears the conversation boomerang from "Do what you always do with that ivory lace around the fringe, Gloria," to "Drop the weapon and put your hands in the air, sir."

John complies, and he knows the officer is relieved because as she runs up it only just seems to register that she's not on duty, she's in a white Sunday sundress, and she's not packing. The officer confiscates John's gun and tells him to, if he'd please, get up and take a walk with her; why don't they sort this all out at the station, instead of disturbing all the rest of the Sunday crowd. 

Yes, ma'am; he's just gotta see to his boy. Gloria's spread out in the dirt, collapsed right there where she stood. Looking at Dean. Maybe thinks about helping him, and looking at John, and maybe thinking about helping the officer instead. She's not doing a good job of tending to either, she's so busy invoking the Holy Trinity.

They're starting to draw a crowd. The Phoenix deskclerk; the Phoenix proprietor, Benton Southerly; Southerly's cardshark buddy, Greg Morgan; the woman from the diner, Rita--John feels like he knows half the town by now, and they're pooling out of the woodworks to watch the streetshow. They shy like fire from wind as John clears the distance between him and Dean, without waiting for approval.

John crouches down and pulls at him so he's sitting upright; he keeps a bracing grip on Dean's shoulder and brushes the hair from his eyes. He can feel the lean, childish muscle jump and squirm beneath his grip, keeping the same syncopated beat as Dean's breaths.

Kid's all rhythm; always all rhythm. John lets out a bemused _tch_ in spite of himself as he runs his hands all down Dean's body, looking for anything broken or abraded. Dean hasn't taken his eyes from the ground and his mouth's twisted like he's tasting something stale and awful, and John doesn't really know if his terse, monosyllabic commands are getting through--breathe, son. Breathe--one, two, three, one--but he keeps himself upright when John lets go and bit by bit he's gaining a little color back. 

That's the best John can hope for right now, that kid's gonna pull through on his own, because he's already heaving himself to his feet and turning heel. Yes, ma'am, I see the crowd. Yes, I think the station would be an excellent place to close the book on this little misdemeanor.

"Snap to, Dean. We're walking. Ain't no one going to carry you."

Then Dean starts laughing, a delirious, choked sound, and whatever remaining damper that'd been moderating his breathing is blown all to hell and it sounds like he's going to asphyxiate here and now, drowned in his own supernatural terror. And this time it's not John's militant conviction that holds him back but Miss Jenny Gardner's hand-cuffs, which she claps around his wrists with a little too much gleeful exuberance (so she could hide something in her sundress after all--innocent like Sunday but as deceptive as anything).

Just a formality, is all, she explains. Miss Jenny Gardner appears to be a fan of formalities. She doesn't seem at all concerned that there's a nine-year old sick with the last dregs of a panic attack nobody can seem to quite explain, and that old rebellious something in John's chest twinges when he realizes why.

In this little town, he and Dean are the strangest things they've ever seen. He can only imagine what their audience is thinking of him now. John's not the self-conscious type, and he's been told he's a quart short of friendly concern for the opinions of others, but he's beginning to think that in this particular town, it probably about twelve hours too late be making a helpful, favorable impression.

Anything off happens in this town, and it's them that did it. Anything sets the kid off, it's his daddy's fault. Daddy's done something, or didn't do something, or hasn't done near enough--maybe all of the above. 

It's a load, all right, heavier than Miss Jenny Gardner's handcuffs, shiny with newness and blinding in the sunlight. 

John hazards a glance back over his shoulder, and is surprised with what he sees.

Woman from that diner, one who sat up with Dean while John was winning them room and board--she's got Dean kissed up awkwardly against her chest. She looks about as familiar with the motion as Dean does, but he catches fractured pieces of her uncertain whispers and she's caught the same general idea as John--just breathe, baby, breathe. Follow my lead, now; there ya go--and that just has to suffice.

Town's crazy as all hell and John can feel it in every inch of him that it's going to get a hell of a lot weirder, time they split, but if ever there were a reason it existed--

It's a lot like the rest of the world that way.

 

**courage (ii).**

 

Police station's musty as ever. Smells like a gas leak and a pile of wet socks, mixed together. Rita can't honestly say the diner smells much better--just add a layer of smoke and alcohol atop to garnish--but it's August. The smell's downright unseasonable.

God, she doesn't know what she's saying. It's just the waiting that's painful, though it's not like she has to. It's really none of her affair. Just seems like everywhere she turns since these two boys stumbled in, they're there. She's a little scared and a lot curious and ever since she sat down with this boy, his face's been digging at her. Just looks so lost. She makes a show of switching the National Geographic in her hands with a Newsweek from '82--it's got a picture of Stephen Jay Gould and a dinosaur that looks like it was swiped from the set of Godzilla, which definitely lends credence to that whole evolution deal--and snatches another look at the kid.

She doesn't even know his name. He's mostly coming down now, though he doesn't look any less like he's going to be violently ill if someone so much as looks at him funny. Looks drawn and exhausted, too, but that frankly don't surprise her. She knows where he was at three this morning and she can guess he didn't drop right off into down pillows and silk sheets right after; and the last half hour working to breathe like it wasn't natural and automatic can't have helped.

Kid's daddy's making a phone call in the room just behind them. Wall vibrates with every shouted word; it doesn't sound like the call's going quite the way he wanted. Rita's got her head slid right up against the wall as he leans against it, hears words like "... _lost_ him? The _hell_ you mean you lost him. Jim, so help me--"

Rita thinks maybe it's some hired gun, supposed to bust them out of Beatty; maybe he took the cash upfront and turned tail. Jim, she didn't know.

She sneaks another look at the kid, switches to a 1986 Vogue. Wonders what happened. Wonders if Jenny'd spill a story if she got a few rounds of Jack in her. 

But then, you shouldn't exploit people on Sunday. 

She can just ask the kid, he starts looking more like a human and less like Stephen Jay Gould's pretty pretty corpse. His eyes screw shut every time there's another bellow through the wall, and he kneads the bridge of his nose just between his eyebrows.

"Can I get you anything? Cuppa water?"

It comes out in her Waitress Voice, more impersonal than she meant.

"--Get it myself," he grates out, the beginning of which is lost somewhere in his throat. He slides down from the chair bonelessly, and the kid just looks so damn whacked Rita wants to pour an entire pitcher of water down on him, like it'd spruce him up like a plant.

He sways a little, like he's fighting vertigo, and wins. Marches with newfound purpose to the bathrooms just across the room and disappears within.

Kid's coming around then. That's good; that's real good. Rita ain't ever had a little brother; might've had a child, but she lost it a few months in. Not careful enough, said her mother. Up until this point, the only child she really knew was Simon Walker, and he's thirty-five; and he was such a sorry excuse for one this kid usurped his position in just under twelve hours.

Pulled at the protective streak in her, maybe. Made her want to serve him drinks and let him sit the tables, blinds $100/$200, No Limit Hold'em. Show him things so he wouldn't find them when she wasn't watching.

Which is just silly. He's not even hers. Besides, the nicest thing he's said to her was her shitty town fucking sucked.

Nevertheless, after she flips through Vogue back to front and once upside down, and he still doesn't come back, she ventures into the bathroom herself.

Station crapper's only got one stall, and the door gives at her touch. Smells just as bad in here as it did in the front room, but not any worse.

Kid's bent over the toilet, hands glued to the rim like he doesn't care what kind of shit he's touching. He's making half-hearted dips toward the toilet, but nothing more comes up (because _mmm_ , Rita can smell the vomit now; old familiar smell but never any more welcome than it was the first time).

"You good?"

And his head bounces on his neck like he doesn't want to dignify that with a response, but it's almost a shrug and it's almost something like a _Yeah, sure, lady._

"You want that cuppa water now?"

Same response. He doesn't make any move to follow her as she makes to leave, but he lets go the toilet and he'll catch up on his own time.

"You know. You coulda done that in there. Give them an excuse to change that sorry carpet in there, maybe air the place out a little. Here, someone's just going to have to come in with a bottle of bleach and some ammonia. You're going easy on them. What the hell for? Town sure ain't going easy on _you_."

Kid makes a little noise and she's not sure what it is, but it sounds better than sick.


	4. Chapter 4

**zombies (iii).**

 

Rita's Diner seems wildly more legitimate when you're let in through the back door, rather than walking through the casino at the front. This is not the impression back doors are supposed to give. But given Rita's sudden amenability to his presence after--rather than before--his arrest for threatened assault with a potentially lethal weapon, there's almost a logic to this.

Diner's not open Sundays, so like as not she's only gonna be able to whip up a sandwich or two; grilled cheese if they're lucky, says Rita.

That'd be the best thing that happened to them all day, John replies, and laughs, and makes it sound like he's in better spirits than he is.

Rita's satisfied, and likewise smiles brightly, and disappears into the kitchen. With any luck, she's off to grill the most carefully prepared cheese sandwiches in the world, because John really needs her out of earshot--but he really wants to keep her on their side. Rather, he doesn't want her more suspicious than she is, or more curious. More involved--because never in John's experience has _involvement_ done a person good.

See, the problem with hunting kelpies is you start expecting kelpies. You hop in the cockpit of a Beech Duchess 76 and you don't expect to land her but for refueling until you hit Oakland. You go expecting creatures that're human at least part of the time--ruthless when vengeful, but entertainers of a proper respect for reason and compensation. Something in that whole scenario slips a disk and it throws you off your game.

And something is _damn_ off.

"You good?"

Dean rolls his eyes like he's heard that question a half dozen times today, so John assumes he must be. He arches backward over the booth and snags a salt shaker from the table behind them. Kid's far too familiar with this place. This is still their first day in town, right?

"Old Jim Beatty. Got anything on him?" 

_What'd he do to you?_ is something John is saving for when he's established he and Dean are actually on speaking terms. Right now, they don't appear to be.

Dean shrugs. 

John waits.

Dean folds. "Really likes Beatty," he concedes.

John sighs. Runs his hand down his face. Rate this is going, they're gonna need to order dessert, keep Rita blissfully ignorant of just how minor 'threatened assault with a potentially lethal weapon' actually is. "Likes, as in how much?"

"Like he wanted everyone to stay here and more people to come and see how great it was."

Rhyolite's a ghost town; woeful spirit, slightly directionally challenged? It's been known to happen. But it didn't fit with ( _and there's that question again_ \--)

Didn't shy from the salt--seemed more concerned with the glass and the blood. And no ghost'd be so familiar with the living townsfolk. Not without them noticing. "But not like a vengeful spirit."

Dean considers this. Then he considers the salt shaker, the coasters, the napkins, and finally considers it again. "No." He considers the silverware. "And not a shapeshifter either. It didn't--"

He twists, returns to his examination of the drink menu. "It didn't feel like that."

John's thinking like it's time to start pressing whether Dean likes it or not, because this thing's been hell since they were a thousand feet in the air, and it's removed their circumstances pretty damned far from that, for one day's work. But Rita swings back in, three grilled cheese sandwiches, basket of toast.

"Out of chips," she explains. "More'll be in Monday, you're still here. Otherwise, you can take your toast and be grateful I'm serving you anything at all."

"I tip," John reminds her. Today he does, in any case. "Bar fully stocked?"

"Depends. You want something straight, or something fancy?"

John hazards a glance at the drink menu. Anything to keep her out--ten minutes is all. Dean's got the drink menu to something looks neon and fruity and reasonably complex. "Zombie, if you can do it right."

Dean and Rita exchange a look, the basis for which is as alien to John as Dean's bits with Sam.

"Oh, I can. I can. You have no idea." And she's gone for now.

John satisfies himself with this.

The moment Rita swings out of earshot, he prompts: "It didn't feel like that." Dean hasn't had occasion to know what a shapeshifter of any sort 'feels like'; hunters who _did_ were few and far between, much as John knows. "So what'd it feel like, then."

It's not that it wasn't a shapeshifter. It's that it was something _couldn't_ be as clean and clear and real as that.

"Tell me."

Dean squirms, fades to an off-color shade of frightened. But he stops fiddling with the damned coasters, lets the house he's building collapse. "Like--"

John can see Dean's thoughts skitter from one thing to the next, slow as they dwell on specific recollections. They move the way his hands do, in and out of pockets, belt loops--anything and everything.

"Like everything--"

Snap around, double back, entertain new routes. Like a mouse in a model labyrinth, locked in, panicked, and seeking a solace that can't be had.

"Like everything _bad_ that's ever happened. Was happening again."

Put that in functional terms. A curse? Psychicplay? No; were that the case, he can't imagine Dean would have lived. (He quickly puts the possibility from his mind.)

Dean opens his mouth again. His tongue clicks, sibilant, like he's testing the air before everything comes spilling forth: "Like everything bad was happening again _and_ \---every bad thing that's _gonna_ happen...

"Those were happening too."

Which is at once as impossibly vague and as agonizingly explicit as is physically possible. John tries his hardest not to think about the bad things that've happened, even limited to the nine short years Dean's been around, but he's made a lifestyle of chasing all the bad things yet to come. What can he say; the two are fairly codependent. 

But a thing that could cause something like that? Damnably elusive. One thing he's sure--it's not the plane, after all. (Lets Jim off the hook for that one, though Sam's still gone, which means Jim's still blacklisted for the summer.) It was the plane, it wouldn't have followed them out here, and it sure as hell couldn't do what Dean says it can. The city, maybe? Cursed ground screws the plane to hell? It makes sense; electrics were only shot when they started over Beatty, and they'd flown five hundred scotch-free miles before then.

Dean clears his throat, breaking John's train of thought. "Wanna make a call," he announces.

John's negation is automatic.

"I wanna make a call, _to Sammy._ " As though that changes the response. John wishes it did.

Dean bites the inside of his lip, jaw hard set: _why not?_

"Out of quarters. Can't make a call, you don't have quarters." Weak. Callous, undoubtedly. But it's undebatable fact.

Keep your head in the game, John Winchester. _You lose that, and you lose everything._ Everything.

Kid's only just pulling it together, and like or not, this isn't California, and what's out there's not kelpies. John needs him focused and ready, because he needs him to be holding his own best he can. Neither of them need an encore for today. Just keep to the case. Dean doesn't need to know the latest on Blue Earth.

Hell, _John_ doesn't need to know. They're five hundred miles out, and stranded; even if they made a suicide run for it, chances are they'd get pulled right back in. He doesn't need to know about Sam, same as any day he doesn't need to know what his boys are doing. Anything worth calling for, and it probably ain't good news.

As it is, it's been almost five years, and he still can't help it. Five years, and still: He thinks 'Sammy' and 'too far' and 'gone,' and his mind inevitably swings to--

(Mary. White dress. Smoke curling to the ceiling. Mary curling up there, too.)

But Jim would've seen that coming; as much fuck-assed stupid as it takes to misplace a child, man's a good hunter and a better diviner. He'd see that coming. Or at the very least, come. 

Thing like that doesn't pay a visit without leaving marks.

 

**mary and grace.**

 

Jim scrapes his teeth down his lower lip, scrapes out, "Fuck."

This probably isn't what folks had in mind when they talked about men of God losing their 'children.' If Sam Winchester's got himself gone, it's not a lack of faith in God that's done it, that's for sure.

He'd expected Sam to come down for the service; he didn't know why. When both of the Winchester boys were laid up together, Dean'd bring them down--primarily to sit in the back, shoes propped up on the pew in front, yawning exaggeratedly, of course. But they'd come. 

Jim assumes it's on account of Mary, brought him to mass every Sunday before she died. Maybe it reminds him of her, makes him safe. Jim can't think of any other reason they'd come. Dean makes it plain they're not there for Jim's sermons, or even for God. So it must be Mary.

Getting a call from the Winchesters used to mean a call from Mary. She's asking about how his day went, telling how that recipe he'd sent her had gone over with Dean, then teething; and she's asking about crop patterns, weather fluctuations. She's asking about life and she's asking about death, all in the same breath. She's asking him to a baby shower in April because, in her words, April is the cruelest month and Minnesota spring's so godless it doesn't need him anyway. He politely declines.

Come November and he gets a call from John, and he's asking him to come to a funeral. Jim doesn't go, and apparently, neither does John.

Two months later and what's left of the Winchesters show up at his doorstep and the two boys get left; a stranger rumbles away in a black Chevy Impala and Jim wonders where the John Winchester Mary spoke so fondly of had gone.

Jim spends Christmas Eve feeding a seven-month old Sam wheat germ and Cheerios and letting Dean live off his fat, because he refuses to eat anything at all.

Five o'clock Christmas morning and the stranger's reappearance is just as austere as his going. He gathers his Sleeping and Not Sleeping children, gives awkward thanks and a merry Christmas. And it just seems so empty, Jim can't bring himself to return the sentiments. It has nothing to do with the two-foot plastic tree riding shotgun (though this doesn't help), but Jim doesn't think it's going to be a very merry Christmas at all.

Not without Mary.

Mary doesn't get talked about, but she doesn't get forgotten. Dean volunteering to sit through prayers and hymns, acting as though it is an unforgivable imposition all the while--that's Mary. Dean's knowledge of God is about as unhinged and backwards as can be, but he at least has the proper feeling. Sam doesn't have any of that. And to Jim's chagrin, he doesn't think John has plans to be changing that any time soon.

But it's not his place to argue the Winchesters' theology. John operates on the functional minimum--there's evil to be put down, and there's a way to do it. That's all. Just keep people safe, and that's all. Keep his family safe, because he won't make that mistake ever again. Doesn't need to know the Why if he knows what to do--just keep focus.

So when John shows up on his doorstep--3am again, and uninvited as usual--three days ago, Jim gives him what he needs. (There are kelpies in California.) 

But then, the catch: "The life that you and Mary had--that's what she chose. What she wanted." He nods his head toward the window, where Sam and Dean are staring up at a red kite caught in a dead tree. It's summer, but they've got their coats on, pockets stuffed and bulging with everything they own. He's asking, Is _this_ the life that you want for them? 

John looks out the window at Dean, and he looks at Sam, and the pitch of his eyebrows, the sag of his shoulders, say, _We can't go back._ "They have to be ready." 

With a sign, Jim acquiesces. "Rumor's there's kelpies out west--Oakland Bay, California. Sienna'd do it, but her boy's off to college in a couple days." John makes a face that makes clear what he thinks of Sienna's priorities, but he doesn't decline. "I've a couple things that are headed out that way. It's a good novice case, if you're interested. I could have your car back from the impound lot when you came back."

"Dean doesn't like planes. We flew him out to Greenville once, visit Mary's--Mary's brother. And he--" John pauses. _He needs to be ready._

There's a 'yes' buried in John's silence somewhere, and a 'no' in Jim's. But John is a hunter and Jim is not his keeper, and if John wants to push, Jim won't be the one to pull him back. Jim sighs again.

John's justification: "Needs to learn he can't scare from something's not gonna hurt him. Things he can't fix."

Jim doesn't have the heart to tell him that didn't ever help Mary any. However, he seriously considers bringing up that particular facet when John's throwing a fit over the phone, after he's the one who's gone and got himself arrested.

He can only pray that John Winchester will find his way--that he will teach his sons to find theirs. For now, all Jim can do is find Sam. He slams his wardrobe shut and starts excavating the underside of the bed. There's a million places a small thing that doesn't want to be found could be lurking.

Sam was outside, Jim would have seen him come downstairs; of that much, he's sure. He's here; somewhere, he's here. Has to be.

 

**who's old jim? (ii)**

 

"So, what's the damage, stranger?" Rita asks, when ten minutes pass and the only conversation seems to be between the kid and his grilled cheese sandwich. He attacks it like it's about to run off, if he even takes his teeth from it.

Daddy Dangerous over there snorts, but his mouth is full of words instead of food, and he humors her. "Writing a book or something? _Richard Fainall_ was fined $200 and whatever his gun was worth, for threatened assault with a potentially lethal weapon. He's being processed overnight, but so long as he gets out of town in due time, Beatty's not going to worry."

Richard Fainall, huh. Man starts waving a pistol around and the town's not pressing charges unless he wants to stick around. Sounds like Beatty. (After all, whole town voted to set Andrew Kimmel out on the outskirts with his rifle and never had anymore trouble outta him. So why not?)

"You called, from the police station. You talk to Sammy?" says the kid, to his daddy for once, and not the sandwich. The words are heavy with accusation, an impression only magnified by the cumbersomeness with which they are introduced. It's the voice Rita used when she closed the door on Simon Walker. The indictment rolls, gains in strength. "You even let him know you'd called? Or did you just talk about--"

"Leave it, Dean. Got nothing to say to Sammy. Anything we say can wait 'til it can be said in person."

Rita gets the impression that not a whole lot gets said in person, from the stifled look on the kid's face, but the impression she's getting more and more is there's things can't be said in mixed company. Two criminals with domestic tribulations and a waitress too curious for her own good.

"I just want to--"

" _Jesus_ , Dean! Just 'cause your brother's not here doesn't mean you have to _be_ him. Look."--And Richard Fainall awards Rita with a swift glance, like he doesn't really want this on display for all the world. Rita stays, because there's silverware laid out on the table, and she doesn't want it to be used for... alternative purposes. It's happened. She doesn't know them.

All she knows is they're keeping things back, and what's getting pushed forward isn't feel-good and amicability. 

"Just--" A pause, another half-glance in her direction. "Whatever you saw, it wasn't real. No smoke. And there's no smoke, there's no fire. Plenty of things to watch out for, but that--it's not one of them."

"I know." And for the briefest moment, kid--Dean?--isn't wearing a nine-year old face. He's thirty and he's seen everything, end of the world and further. She turns back to Richard Fainall, makes sure she's keeping them straight.

"Keep it that way. We'll deal with this when we're off the clock. Ten, twelve hours--focus."

Dean resigns himself to slouching in the corner of the booth, focuses on tracing the patterns on the Formica. The pause is not a pregnant one, and Rita can feel the table slipping back into total silence long before it ever gets there.

After a long while--another ten minutes, tops, but that's a long time to not go talking when you're sitting down, eating together--Richard Fainall speaks. "Didn't see Old Jim on the way over, or at the station. Know where I could find him?" 

Rita looks at him like he's talking nonsense and Richard Fainall misinterprets her confusion for reluctance. 

"Just wanted to apologize, is all. There was a misunderstanding. He got a home address, when he's not wandering the streets?"

Rita considers a retort, sifts through words like she's playing Scrabble's badass older cousin. But instead she just asks, not without trepidation, "Who's Old Jim?"

 

\--

 

Lives balance on moments like these.

On things like these. One stressed, threadbare instant, and the entire world splits at the seams like a patchwork blanket. "Old Jim," he repeats. "Jim Beatty. Greets people they ride into town, he's the one who-- And who I--"

And John just shuts up, because he knows this much: This is a game he can play. Jim's outed himself a thing worth killing, and John's not going to stop at threats next time he comes a-calling.

Rita sighs sympathetically, and John realizes she's got green eyes just like Dean's--and she's giving him the look Dean gives Sammy, he starts on about something in the middle of the night (monsters and changelings and things in the dark). But she draws away ever so slightly, and there's a new tense rigidity to her posture with which John is also familiar. It's called fear. 

"Honey, I know everyone in this town and there's not a soul named that here. Leastaways not anymore. Last person with the name Beatty was busy founding the town, and he's been gone from these parts since...nineteen-oh- _eight._ "

He's not a ghost, and he's sure as hell not a person. "Gone to where?" John's easing his jacket back up his shoulders and wishing his weaponry hadn't been confiscated by Miss Jenny Gardner, Police Zealot.

Rita's head twists, dark curls popping over her shoulder, and she starts falling into the same patterns as anyone else who discovers in the Winchester minutiae a source of endless curiosity. Fear she can't quite place, unease. Distrust. Things don't follow this pattern, and like as not she'll end up dead, not scared. Let her scare; John won't be the one to turn her off that path. Better to be alive and scared than dead and unsuspecting of a damned thing. (Dead and _terrified_ , they'd best not discuss.)

"Didn't go...anywhere, really. Just walked out into the desert, didn't come back."

No, it's not important, Rita. Just satisfy a man's curiosity. Which sounds like a dirty line in a bad daytime soap, and John doesn't have time for innuendos.

Zombie skates across the table, leaving a snail-trail of condensation on the Formica, but not before Rita takes a hearty swig of it. She wets her lips and makes a performance of calming her nerves, like she's telling him something she shouldn't. 

John gets the impression that in her book, that comes from telling him anything at all.

 

**plumajillo in spring.**

 

Jim Beatty comes west like everyone else, looking for gold like everyone else, a little stir-crazy with the American Dream, like everyone else. But he doesn't go to California, or Oregon; says he doesn't believe in borders. Not gonna set up shop on the coastline, because there's no other place you can go, you start at the edge. Can't go any way but stone cold postal.

So he stops in Nevada, just shy of a desert so sinful it blooms like a rainforest in spring just to draw the unsuspecting in. It's wildflowers and dust, is what he tells everyone back home. Natural smoke and mirrors.

But Jim Beatty has one thing that makes him not like anyone else. He's got a different Bible tucked into his waistband, and it tells him things he knows he ain't got any business knowing. (Which makes him not any different than the couple dozen other prospectors gonna strike it rich out of pure dumb luck.)

He draws a line in the dirt, crosses it with another one. Towne Center, he pronounces it. Crew's still a couple days out, crawling through Texas, but he's chosen his crossroads.

Got a cigar case in his vest pocket, dented in places, but monogrammed and clearly worth something somewhere (just not here). Case has got some things in it much the same--meaningless flotsam, odds n' ends, picture a' him. It's a real portrait, and he's suited up and stiff-necked like he's never been since. Taken when he turned thirteen. All part of a list of things don't have worth 'til he buries them where he stands.

Waits.

Two years, he waits, busied more with the forgetting than the wistful expecting anything's really gonna happen, because nothing does.

He builds his town up from nothing. Doesn't strike it rich, but he strikes it pretty handsomely. Builds himself up from his bootstraps, and he's living the dream. Shops and homes line the place where he made his first mark in the dust, and the yards are filled with wildflowers, plumajillo and sage.

He draws that cross in the road again, while he marvels at his fortune. What happens next, the gal he meets--out of nowhere, and with his black Bible still idling in his pocket, he knows what she is--gal he meets, she's got red eyes and a silver tongue, and she offers him ten years of unprecedented success.

Hundred years from now, Beatty will still be reeling with its ten year lucky streak. Other towns, they'll die. They'll be empty skeletons nobody remembers. But Beatty'll still be here.

Ten years. And he'll die a very rich man.

Two things no one ever tells him: Riches aren't worth much, where he's going, and ten years isn't near as long as it sounds.

 

\--

 

\--Which is a little bit of Rita's story (which in itself is a two parts lyric gossip and one part history in truth) and a lot of John filling in the blanks. But John has a lot of notes and he knows a lot of people, and he knows a little something about crossroads.

He doesn't know what Jim is (you're a person and you're flesh and blood on Earth; a ghost, and you're stuck in the in-between. Dead, and you're just gone. But a soul dragged to hell? John can't even imagine), but one thing he does: he finds whatever seduced Old Jim, that'll mean he climbs one rung further up this case.

Things click into place with an old familiarity they shouldn't have. He's swinging halfway through the back door before either Dean or Rita has a chance to start asking questions can't be answered.

"Dean, you got--"

.45 flips smooth through the air as Dean releases it with a familiarity of motion he really shouldn't have--slow, arching underhand pitch. He never got past T-ball, he'll never throw a curve ball across the green, but he can throw a gun, and John can catch one.

Whatever he's feeling about Dad, whatever he's missing with Sammy gone--it doesn't matter. And it won't, because it _can't_. Because it's Family against the Other, and Family can't tear itself apart when the Other's out hunting after it. Family can be broken and fractured to high hell and it'll hold, if its pieces are all running in the same direction. "You go back to the room and you pick everything up, and you wait for me, you hear? You wait for me, and you don't leave that room for anything. You know what to do."

"Yessir." And his voice rings hard and strong and true, and John knows he's burned his doubts and resentments and got them buried deep.

(They'll come up, John knows they will. Come up and taste like ash in his mouth. Come out mean and distorted and so much worse, but this way, it won't kill them. He doesn't think. It hasn't yet.)

"Let's go."


	5. Chapter 5

**the quiet game (i).**

 

Everyone has played the Quiet Game. Crocodile-wearing Aliza Gallagher was fond of it, especially when her soaps were on and she, sweaty and flushed from the tap-tap-tap dance of her shoes around the flat, she collapsed in front of the television. Sam Winchester is world-class.

He can hear jumbled movement downstairs, a sort of haphazard thrashing and shifting and banging that means Pastor Jim has found him vanished. Part of Sam is tired of this already, wants to brush the dust from his clothes and the spiderweb from his hair and pop his head out the attic hatch and scare Pastor Jim half to death. The other part of him is tired in a different way and just wants to tunnel deeper into his city of cardboard boxes and vanity chests, locked safes and moth-eaten drapes.

His chest pulls in two ways: up, because he feels like he's going to retch, he's probably inhaled so much dust; and down, because that's the way your heart pulls when you're lost. That's when he realizes he's in two pieces again. 

_Warning; small, removable parts. Keep away from children. Recommended ages 4+._ Which is what Dean says whenever they lift a toy (which isn't often, and they only ever last just long enough to be missed--kind of like Dad). 

When Sam finally turns four, it's like he's been inducted into a secret club. When he makes a point of mentioning this, Dean tells him the 4+ means four years older; means older brothers only. But that's a little too convoluted to be true, even Sam sees that much.

When Sam shouts, _you're a fat liar, Dean; I know everything, everything, and all you do is lie to me. I'm not a kid anymore, and you're a liar,_ Dean drops the toy in question. Styrofoam and balsa wood, some little toy plane that came in a plastic sheath, lying in the green green grass. There's a beat where no one moves or speaks.

For good measure, a coda: _I'm not a kid anymore!_

_I'm not. I know you're lying to me. I know everything._

Dean backs off.

Looks like he's been thwacked in the stomach with a soccer ball. One slow exhale rolls out of him and his head is kind of bobbing-nodding, face twitching like he's trying to keep something in.

Inhale. Stops halfway and Sam can see his brother's throat constrict like that snake did at the store that one time, when the animal lady fed it crickets. That's what Dean's got inside of him. Black, crawly crickets, ugly and dying and hurt-bringing, but Sam doesn't know what put them there.

Sam gives the floor a contrite stare, and he can see the model plane out of the corner of his eye, red and white blurring to pink as he feels hot burning his cheeks and wet pricking at his eyes. _Sorry,_ he doesn't say. He wouldn't know what to be sorry for.

Exhale. It shudders in the middle like broken window blinds and Dean turns it into a biting laugh. "No, you don't. No you don't, twerp." Then his timbre flatlines. "But you got me. There. Take it. It's yours." Then Dean treks back over the green and locks himself in the Impala.

Sam smashes the little plane in a dozen pieces, just kicks and digs and scuffs at it until it's all splinters and grass stained Styrofoam.

Everyone plays the Quiet Game, except for him and Dean. Because then, quiet's never a game. Either it's a command, _Sit down shut up and strap in_ , or it's a consequence.

In Pastor Jim's attic, Sam sucks in air. Sucks in air and dust and who knows what else, and proceeds to cough it all back up. He wants Pastor Jim. He wants Dad. He wants _Dean_.

He wants to call out, but the banging and shuffling down below is already quiet, and Sam gets missed.

The desire, and subsequent hesitation, give way to something that feels a little like loss. And loss is hope, without the fear it won't be realized. It's the _certainty_ it won't. That's the end of that.

Sam twists, grappling at one of the boxes, pulls himself up. Bits of floor (or is it ceiling? Attics are interesting places) come up with him, needled into the seat of his pants. Long, thin spears of thin old wood. They remind him of painted parts mixed in with blades of grass.

He tries to remember what came next.

Closes his eyes to the broken wood (in the grass. In the attic. Anywhere).

Dad came. They left. No one talked. No one--not even him--said anything when they passed by the world's largest ball of yarn. They just rolled on toward Kansas, leaving that great ball of yarn sitting on the horizon in the rearview mirror until it dropped straight out of sight and the only thing left was Dean's reflection, staring sullenly outward. 

Sam wishes Dean would say something.

But it's Dad who speaks. The one thing anyone says the whole drive, and it's about rearview mirrors: "Lot closer than it looks, Sammy. You look at anything in those, and it's all a lot closer than it seems."

All Sam sees is him and Dean.

 

**call waiting (ii).**

 

The phone clicks back into the receiver at the same time everything stops clicking in Dean's head.

Sam was supposed to pick up.

Sammy's supposed to be sitting on Pastor Jim's scratchy lumpy too-familiar couch looking at some book, because that's all there is to do there. He's supposed to be waiting for his phone call, because that's all they ever did when Dad went out and had them left. He's supposed to pick up because Dean needs to talk to him and Sammy is _always_ there to be talked at. Always.

Instead, Dean finds himself two steps shy of peace of mind, because Sam's not here, reallyreally not here, and it never before occurred to Dean that'd ever be an option. Dean is at school, Sam is at home; Sam is a pest, and Dean has locked him out of the car; Sam has set up base camp in the laundry shoot and he will throw detergent in your face--he really will!--if you intrude. Sure, whatever. 

But it's never been, Dean is in Hell and Sam is effectively nowhere.

And Dean feels a little stupid, because he shouldn't need his baby brother around to keep him focused. But mostly he just feels like Sam's been gone too long and he's starting to get lost--because what is he supposed to do? He's sitting in Rita's back office, perched on a chair so deep and squishy Dean's chin just clears the desktop, and he doesn't have Sam, and all that's left is Dad; Dad, who's been boiled down to six essential words: sit tight, don't move, cover up.

Dean idles in the office like he's actually talking to someone, because he doesn't want Rita to know he didn't get through. 

He doesn't know why. 

He just wants--

 

_Hey, little man. What can I do you for? says the waitress, all strawberry curls and too-red lips. Sammy scrunches his nose, doesn't seem to comprehend the question. I'm on vacation with my dad and my brother, he says. Oh really? says she, and Sammy says, Yes, really. And she smacks her lips; asks, Where you headed? and Sammy just keeps talking like she asked the question he wanted to answer--we saw the biggest ball of twine in the whole world! Biggest use'ta be in China, but this one, it started rolling, and just got bigger and bigger with twine until it rolled all around the world and--_

_Christ; what a mouth. Shut up, Sam._

_Don't shush your brother, Dean._

_\--Yeah, don't shush me, Dean._

_Just order your food, Sammy. Whitefall by midnight, remember?_

_So Strawberry Lady blushes and gets back to her job and--_

 

He just wants normal. Or he wants to _look_ normal, which would be fine, too. Maybe it's a little late for that with Rita, what with the Zombies and the guns and Jim. 

At the thought of him, Dean's chest twists in a way he's not expecting, and for a moment he can't breathe and he's desperately afraid his body's going to start on the Not Working track all over again. He tailspins into the next moment before the world rights itself just as quickly as it spun.

No. (Fingers clench.) No, absolutely not. Not again. Breathe. 

Breathe. (Onetwothree ontwothree one two three. One, two...three.)

...Okay. Right. So it's a _lot_ late for some half-cocked play at normalcy. He's just teasing along some raw fantasy, and don't he know it. But he just--well.

He really wishes Sam had picked up the damned phone.

He looks up at the clock, hanging skewed on the wall. Five minutes. Oughta shoot for at least seven. Relay his adventures and all. Honestly, Dean'd give anything for thirty seconds. Where are you? _Pastor Jim's, stupid._ You good? _Bored._ Yeah, me too. See you tomorrow. _You'd better._ \--That's all he'd need. Instead, he has two minutes of silence to waste.

Rita's got a picture frame on the desk she's using as a phone book, seems like. Two photos stuck inside. Her and some old guy, leather jacket and a shiny head. Nice car. Second one looks like it was taken in the diner. They're sweaty and completely plastered, but they look happy enough. Not a drunk happy, because Dad never got that smiley, no matter how drunk he got; just a normal happy.

Dean wonders where the guy is now. Probably in Blue Earth, Nowhere, like Sam. 

Notes taped around the edge of the picture frame go like this: 

Beatty Mercantile, 9p-3a. Ask for Simon.

Simon (home). A number.

Simon (parents). A number.

Gloria Tanner. Dress. $270, maybe less if you can talk her down. A number.

Solomon Stewart, flowers. Kady Harper, catering. Ben Foley, music. Agnes Cathcart, rings. Fancy, but Dean can only guess what the hell it's all supposed to be for.

Howard Brace--Carson City PD. Restraining order.

That one's familiar. Restraining order means yeah, Dad killed the thing; 'course he did. But the beneficiary isn't too happy, and it's time to split. New names, new place. New start (but not a fresh one. Same's the last, and same outcome).

Dean tilts his head, looks up again at the skewed clock. Eight minutes. More than enough. He pushes the chair out from under the desk, gives it one last spin.

Comes out.

Rita's waiting.

Dean pictures her sitting right where she is with that Simon guy. Whatever he did made him get gone, Dean wonders if it was better or worse than exhuming Granny's corpse. Breaking and entering. Shooting at things not there.

Probably not worse.

Have to be a monster, it was worse than that. Dad would've heard of it.

...Right?

But then, things get bad enough, they get quieter. Covered up, maybe; talked into never getting talked about. Dean is familiar with the pattern, in more ways than one.

Sam really should've picked up.

 

**the quiet game (ii).**

 

Sam rips into the skin of his finger when he's not paying quite enough attention to the cardboard box he's edging open, and old aches scatter in favor of immediate hurt.

Dean would laugh at him for yelping like that at a papercut, of all things, but Sam maintains that cardboard can be just as vicious as the next thing when it takes you by surprise. Dean's not here and he doesn't see and he doesn't laugh. Dean's not here and he doesn't get the first aid kit and he doesn't rub alcohol into the cut with _ow Dean that hurts stop that you're putting too much!_ especial fervor and he isn't there to make Sam believe Band-Aids are a magic cure-all.

Sam hangs in limbo for a moment, because he's not sure what comes next if _Stop that, Dean!_ doesn't. He isn't sure what comes next, if Dean's not there to move them forward. 

But he has to learn someday, so Sam clamps his forefinger in the fist of his good hand and squeezes tight. 

He looks inside the offending box.

It's not unlike the trunk of the Impala. Old clothes, moldy-smelling articles that Dad keeps for emergencies and that all of them dread, maybe even more than the emergency itself. The stupid thing about this box is that all the clothes are folded, crisp and neat, like they're store-new. 

Sam takes it upon himself to drop the outfits into the disheveled pile they belong in. He's a little tentative at first, trying out his damaged finger after he's decided it's stopped stinging enough to cry over. But it's not bad, and if he gets a little blood on the shirt he balls up and throws in a corner, it's all the better.

It belongs there. Sam is establishing the natural order of things, things as they are supposed to be. His blood on Pastor Jim's ugly old button-up, the rest of the rags strewn about in the attic. It all belongs here.

Sam stands, his back to the window so his shadow stretches out over his handiwork. It looks like a whole town of people fell to dust, leaving only their clothes to mark their space. Pieces of them catch in the sunlight and Sam watches as they skate on some imperceptible wind.

The attic is different now. Not as empty, but just as quiet. Sam knows the feeling, and the familiarity washes over him like late August over summer.

In summertime, everything's a little brighter. Clearer. Pavement flickers out ahead like there's a sheet of water hanging in the air and Dad is going to splash right through it. Dad keeps the windows down and they only stop in places green or bright or new. Summer starts on Long Island and edges northwest: Scranton, Youngtown, Canton, and Kalamazoo. Kokomo, and they sit through a Beach Boys song nobody likes, and it doesn't matter. Dean sings along with the chorus, and Sam hums quietly. Dad joins in by not shutting them up after the seventh sequential rendition. Summer's good. Summer's free, and fast, and breezy straight through Illinois and Iowa. Then the season starts listing--little by little, so slow you can hardly tell, but it's falling behind and Dad doesn't once look back. 

They spend a cold evening in Spencer; Dad goes out and it rains and when Dad finally comes back Dean orders Sam under the covers _lie down, shut your eyes and don't get up 'til I tell you,_ and he sounds so much like Dad in that split, broken moment that it scares Sam into shivering submission.

Dad and Dean are up the remaining half of the night, fumbling about in the bathroom. Sam waits up, too. Whole place smells like isopropyl alcohol and plastic adhesive wrap. It's the first time Sam realizes he has absolutely no idea what Dad does. 

Only time he'd ever seen someone hurt that bad was when they'd gone down that hill in the shopping cart--that was the time when Dean had somehow managed to crack a rib, 'waiting in the Impala.' 

Dad wasn't happy. 

If it's possible, Dean is even less happy in Spencer than Dad was then. Sam hides under the covers until morning.

After Spencer, it's a clear break to Blue Earth and they leave summer in a septic heap off Highway 71, outside the Hannah Marie Country Inn. Late August settles in at the edges and _pulls_ ; the Impala grinds slower and slower, the windows go up to keep the bugs out, and Dad snaps the radio off, to save whatever energy's left to be saved.

Iowa snakes up into Minnesota and the drive is quieter than whispers, just the hiss of tire rubber against hot pavement and the squeak of sweaty bodies shifting on leather seats. Dad doesn't look back and Dean stares out the window and Sam looks down at the tear in the seam of his left shoe, digs at it with the toe of the other.

It's the kind of quiet that presses in on a roomful--a carful--of people looking through each other. It's the kind of quiet that's got heft to it, turns your eyes down (don't look), glues your lips shut (don't speak), builds up silence like masonry between you and everything else (don't feel).

It's the kind of quiet that walks out the door and leaves you alone in an attic.

Sam sighs, wet and warbly like thunder before tears. He is alone in the attic.

He threads through the stacks of boxes, a giant amongst squat, brown buildings. From their insides, he confiscates music boxes, makeup sets. Girls' combs and dolls and why does Pastor Jim have these things? Curios and snuffboxes, a set of tarnished silverware. Wicker balls, baseball bats, knives with letters scratched into the blade, and old old books--instruments without strings, and cups that look painful to drink from.

There's a quickening in his gut, and his lips are so dry he feels them chafe against his sleeve as he attempts to wipe the dust from his face. He is alone in the attic. There's nothing here. 

There's nothing here. He is alone in the attic. But every time he turns around, he expects to see someone hunched over him; blocking his light, or ready to tackle him down, or--something. He kind of expects Dean.

He is alone. He is alone. There is no one in the attic but him. He is alone in the attic. Still, he can't shake his coiling in his chest, like he's swallowed a can of worms and they're struggling their way down to his toes. 

"Pastor Jim...?" he calls, tentative. His throat is so dry it's almost not a sound at all. He sounds full of dust. "Pastor Jim?"

He hopes he can climb down the ladder as easy as he climbed up. In his limited experience, it's always harder to go back than it is to plunge forward.

He drops to his knees and starts feeling for the rise in the floor and the latch that seals the way back down. The wood catches on his injured finger and he yelps. "Pastor Jim?"

It doesn't budge.

"Pastor Jim!"

Harder. Pull _harder_. It's Dean's answer to everything. It _has_ to work.

"Pastor Jim?

Dad?

Dean?

Dean?"

"Hey." A hand jogs his shoulder. "Hey."

Sam freezes.

"Sammy."

The worms turn to rocks in his chest. It's leaning on toward evening one day, late August, in Blue Earth.

There are two people in the world call him Sammy, and they absolutely are not here. But Sam is not alone in the attic.

"Sammy, I don't think we're done here."


	6. Chapter 6

**who's old jim? (iii)**

 

It would definitely explain Miss Jenny Gardner's interrogation. No mention of Jim; a lot of questions--more than usual; him and Dean, and how they came to traveling together. What their home life is like. Where Mom is. (He's my son; when I'm taking care of him, we hit the road, it's part of my job. Taking him to a gig in California. Home's complicated; we move a lot. Mary--Clarisse. When I... _married_ Clarisse, didn't see it all ending up this way. No, I don't think she's happy.

Yes, I'm sorry. Every day.)

It sounds like some sort of awful Child Services intervention waiting to happen. Deadbeat Dad kidnaps his kid, flies him out from Wisconsin to California--and from there, anywhere. Sidetracked in Beatty, Nevada and apprehended by the local badges after--

And really, what the hell does it _look_ like when you see a man, got a gun looks like it's trained on his own kid, who's spilling out panic like he's been--

Fuck. Just _fuck_. John's angry he's so blind. Angry for being played. Angry because he brought Dean and Dean got hurt and John doesn't even know if it means Dean's just too young for this, or John's just not good enough. Angry because time's up and Dean _has_ to be old enough now, and John's tired of watching his sons grow up like it's some kind of time trial. Even though he's the one with the starting pistol in his hand.

If he can catch this here, he can end it. Forestall it. Something.

Anything.

He has one gun, two knives, and five years of self-studied Latin. He has one dead wife, one boy lost, and one boy sitting at the back of a casino with a woman who saw him look like he was gonna shoot the kid--then saw the kid whip out a .45 and _throw it to him._

And now, he's heading off Mr. Beatty Mercantile, because John knows of one crossroads deal, one soul outta Hell, and one man who's probably got a little more to say about both.

_Who's Old Jim?_

Beatty Mercantile had shrugged at that, this morning. His name tag read SIMON (then, scratched in, 'SAYS SHUT UP AND BUY SOMETHING'), and he'd said, _Jim Beatty; life 'a the town. Little, uhm, little cuckoo, you ask him. Real hush-hush, the way gossip goes 'round when a town's not got quite enough to do._

Evidently, someone in this town's up to a whole hell of a lot.

Pulling a soul out of Hell, though (--if that's what Old Jim is; obviously Jim got dragged down, but who knows if what's out there's even really Jim at all). Soul outta Hell takes a lot more than boredom and idiocy to pull. More than a full-scale ritual, for that matter, or anything else John's ever caught sight or wind of. And John's willing to bet, more than a little sacrifice. Sort of thing that can't be hid.

Sort of thing's bigger than one dusty little town that's closed on Sundays.

Maybe on Sundays the neighbors come knocking. Air Force brings the gas. John keeps throwing the pieces together 'til they stick like something reasonable. Rhyolite, convenient little ghost town just north, brings the haunts. And Hell's Gate to the west--God. Hell's Gate. And John wants to break down laughing then and there. When did life start playing it so fucking literal? You get away from deceptive East Coast towns like New Harmony and New Haven and the west just gives up and calls it like it is. Hell's Gate. Should probably check that one out, don't you think, Winchester?

John's not sure which he prefers, but if the day's going to be anything like this gig so far, John hopes this Simon Says character is the sort that sells it straight. He's not? This ain't going to end pretty.

 

\--

 

There isn't a fiber of her being not screaming at her by now. Things like GET OUT, CALL IN, and DON'T PLAY THE FOOL. These strangers, they're dangerous. No way around that. Some people're a little more prone to firearms than others, but she hasn't seen anyone handle them quite like the Fainall boys.

Simon Walker's got a .22 he keeps shined like his Sunday best; he's a pretty good shot, she remembers. Took her out to the range once and he bulls-eyed every one. But like everyone else she's ever known--even Jenny Gardner and the other police, and gunmanship's a piece of their work--he treats it like pride and privilege. She's seen the Fainalls out in the street, and right here in her own place, and she knows that to them a gun's not either.

Dean treats it like a layman's tool and his daddy treats it like a son. Keep it close, keep it handy, and don't waste words.

Whole gig's a lot scary and a little sad, stifled and grim as they look, and Rita just doesn't know what to think. One hand it's a boy and his daddy caught up in something awful, that much she can see; the other, them two're the perpetrators of the something awful in the first place, and it's her job to get herself safe from them, rather than help get 'em saved. 

The way they talk, and the way they act, police should've been her first call. But it's hard to shake Dean sitting at her table eating wet fries and trying on alcohol a little too big for him; or hunched over the toilet saying he doesn't need anyone's help, even if he looks like he does; or just sitting here with his daddy and him, with nobody saying anything but everything being said--being said with tics and postures and silence, some personal language she can read but cannot understand.

Hard to shake the feeling that they're okay, maybe. 

Her luck, they're on the run from Tri-Net, got meth sewn into their hems, gonna make a run for it the second they clean up, cauterize loose ends (like herself; won't that be a treat). But she nudges Dean off toward the office door, tells him he better call his brother, she doesn't care what his daddy said.

Anything to keep him here. The Dreamer part of her thinks it's safer here than out, and the Reasonably Frightened part of her doesn't think Dean would get left, so she's got to keep him close. Richard Fainall's got to come back for him. Gotta come back here. This probably isn't what's meant by 'hostage situation' when the drug lord serial killers come to town, but generally drug lord serial killers don't bring their children.

"You get ahold of your brother?" Rita asks when Dean announces his return with a door slammed shut. Somehow, she imagines 'Sammy' sixteen years old and tall, like Johnny in The Outsiders or maybe Sodapop Curtis; she doesn't remember who's who.

She doesn't expect him to say, and he doesn't look like he expects to, either, but appearances can be deceiving: "Yeah. Told me the same thing Dad did."

Meaning _nothing_ , is Rita's first thought. But she reorients herself to the subject quickly enough. Communication via silence seems to be a house specialty, based on what she's seen of them. Dean's got a look on his face of hard-edged determination, the blunt conviction of which seems out of place on any kid, so maybe his phone call sealed whatever his daddy had told him in the parlance of silence.

"Simon." And the name's so out of context Rita almost asks who he's talking about. ( _Who's Old Jim?_ )

"Just one of the boys 'round town," Rita allows. She wonders what the hell she'd left in her office made him ask about Simon Walker. "Friend of mine. Works down at Beatty Mercantile most days."

"He ever...Did he ever do anything weird? Maybe like you weren't expecting it, and it didn't seem like him."

Good God. What had she left out? She's written so many angry letters (never mailed, God forbid) she can't begin to imagine what all the kid thinks he's on to. "Sure. Most folks do--end up not being who you thought they were. Secret's bigger for some than others," she answers pointedly.

Dean cheek twitches like he's tasted something sour. He takes the hint. Don't Ask, Don't Tell's a two-way street. "I should go now. Work to do."

No. 

Kid's not going anywhere; not talking like he is. "Better off just staying here." Daddy has to come back. Not going to get far waving a gun around like he is. Not going to get far looking for Jim Beatty's ghost--or even his grave. Not going to get far down the road to Crazy. He has to come back sooner or later. Or get dragged back.

"I have to. It's the only thing I--" As it's as though he remembers he's not supposed to talk to her, the way he cuts off. "Thanks for lunch." 

He walks out without further explanation, and the door swings back with a mournful rattle-screech. Rita lets him go. She let Richard drug lord psycho serial killer cardshark public assailant zombie-drinking Fainall go, and she lets Dean more-of-the-same Fainall follow right after.

She don't even ask, _Where do you think you're going?_ , not to either of them, because it's clear enough they'd never tell. Not if it's going to matter in any way.

But it's also Beatty, so it's easy enough to guess.

 

**doorways (i).**

 

Thoughts catch on weird things sometimes. Dean's is playing out Rita and the Simon dude stop-action; they step back and forth between being rosily drunk in the diner and zipped up in jackets on the hood of a car, but there's not much in between. Every time Dean attempts to conceive of something, it just turns back to the familiar: Curses, monsters, and ghosts.

That's the reason things like that always happen to his family, anyway. But Rita isn't them and she's probably luckier if she kept it that way. He's known this from the beginning. Rule #1's you keep outsiders out, devils or no. Keep things simple. But Rule #1 doesn't make provision for keeping family _in_ , so Dean's thinking that simple ain't exactly fair.

He drags across the parking lot, but he kicks dirt up at the rock median, picks up speed, and takes the stairs two at a time. They're painted a slick scarlet Dean doesn't think matches the 'moldy cheese' vibe the rest of the building promotes, but it's almost like a red carpet and it's almost like he's going somewhere other than the room, to do something other than shack up and shut up.

Snaps the "Do Not Disturb" placard off the door, turns the key in the lock. Door opens into cool, dark cleanness.

Cleanness.

No more iron jacks on the floor. Dad's tourist pamphlets are nowhere to be seen, meticulous piles gone from the rightmost bed. Gideon's Bible's found itself on the nightstand again, back from its trip under the bed, where Dean sent it the night before. Lights are off, TV's not on, Dad's uneaten Poor Boy isn't a moist lump at the edge of the sink.

Green duffel's not bookending the free souvenirs and promotionals the room's prior occupants left. Green duffel isn't anywhere.

Green duffel's a bad thing to get lost. Dean's first thought is, Dad's gonna kill him. His second is, _Unless something else finds me first._

Better to make sure Dad goes the honors; at the very least, he kills things clean. Dean edges clear of the doorway and backs against the wall. Something's in here, it knows it's got company. Can't be helped. Bed, bed, drawerset, closet, bathroom alcove. Dean's estimations, that's five too many places. He's got a knife he doesn't really know how to use and the full knowledge that he screws up, nobody's going to come running in to back him up.

_Don't panic._

Butting against Dad's orders hadn't worked too well earlier today, but Dean's thinking it's best to duck out of this one. Thing doesn't jump out when his shadow crosses the light leaking in from the door, it can stay put. Dean's gonna run like hell.

As it turns out, shadows _do_ obscure the late afternoon flush, just before Dean breaks. Only it comes from the outside, not the in.

"Thought you'd be back soon enough," says a voice, thankfully disturbingly worrisomely human.

Dean turns around and it's a tall man in a tan suit, topped off with an outback hat and a set of killer shades, the last of which Dean makes sure to voice.

"Cute. But boy, you in a heap of trouble. You gonna tell us where your daddy is?"

God _damn_ it.

"Gas station. We're going to get gas and split, unless that's a problem." Dean breathes out deep. Just people. Just people. Just let them run with that and they'll fill out the rest on their own. Just people; lead 'em where you want 'em.

"Gas station's a hell of a lot more useful, there's gas there. Now, since that all is under my charge, I'm thinking your daddy's unusually dumb, or you're lying. Which one do you want to own up to?"

Dean hates people.

There's a wooden creak from outside and a second shadow swallows the last of the sunlight. Raw instinct presses Dean closer against the wall, though he's getting the impression there actually aren't any monsters under the bed. They're standing in the doorway.

"He's the one, all right. He's the kid, stole my goods."

This has to be a joke.

"Gave him money, get me gas out here, but you heard him straight--gonna run off, and do me a disfavor in the going!"

Seriously? That's it. Shitty town fucking sucks.

"Put the rifle down, Mr. Kimmel. You're a good man, so I let you keep it. You start acting like you're going to use it, and I'm going to reconsider," says the man in the outback hat. Dean can't bring himself to feel any due gratitude, much less express it. This is stupid.

Andrew Kimmel called the Air Force on them. The _Air Force_. Where in the hell does--

Beatty. That's where. Beatty-unholy-Nevada.

Rifle-happy quarter-keeping Air force-calling Andrew Kimmel's spewing nonsense quick as smiling and Dean's slumped sullen against the wooden paneling and the man in the outback hat might be interrogating him, but Dean's going to play it mute on this one. Probably not Dad's idea of Shut Up and Wait, but it's nice to have a Plan B that follows the same basic principle.

"--thought your daddy was gonna crash that plane my _god_ was really not banking on that one. Scared me shitless, he really did. Don't need you dead quite yet, I don't think--"

Dean tenses, fingers to shoulders to jaw. Andrew Kimmel cuts off, and the expression painted across his face is one of intense satisfaction--on account of what, Dean's not sure, but he's not sure he wants to know.

"You didn't think you got landed here purely on account of your shit luck, did you? We're waiting. All across the damned US of A, we're waiting. Just glad I'm the one to find you. Makes sitting around in this shithole town almost worth it. Because administration's got plans for you Winchesters." Teeth, peeking out behind thin, flat lips. "You best hope your daddy's seeing to your darling baby brother, before we do." 

He called them Winchesters. He knows about Sammy. He knows--he knows _everything_ , probably. Everything. The prospect is dizzying.

"Got your guns, got your charms. Your fancy silver knives, your little black magic Bibles. Only a matter a time before we get you." There's those teeth again; Andrew Kimmel's grin is positively reptilian. "Let me ask you something, Dean. A little Sunday School. You know what a demon is?"

Deep breath. Bad things get gone when you shove them someplace you can't see, and you leave 'em there to rot. You bury them. Salt, burn, and goodbye--they're not supposed to come back. Trouble is, they do. They always fucking do. Dean never considered that. 

_Should_ have; reallyreally should have: Devil's in the doorway.

"I _asked_ , do you know what a demon is?"

 

**fear (ii).**

 

They're tearing across Nebraska, windows rolled up. The air is electric with storm-calling, and Dad aims to beat the weather out of the state. Wyoming by midnight.

Inside the Impala, the air is wet and heavy, like it's been breathed too many times, and Dean feels this disorienting lightheadedness, makes like he's gonna throw up. But breathe in too deep and it's like dying; he can't imagine getting anything _up_.

Or new stuff down. No, Boston Market doesn't sound that good. Drive-through is fine. Sammy shifts the seat and Dean knows he's being looked at. He drives the groan of pain down his throat as easy as he can make it, and keeps silent.

Sammy's gonna ask; the words are beating against the backs of his teeth, the same way _I hate you I hate you I hate you_ was, all through Nebraska. But Sammy's smart enough to know that no matter what, _Dad can't know._

Dad doesn't ask. Eases the car to parked, leaves the brake off at the gas station. Wyoming by midnight.

He hops out to pay, and Sammy hops the seat, quick chop to the gut. Dean lets slip an awful, scraping, breathy yelp; it's the last thing he should have done, he _knows_ it, but _god_ , it's like his middle's being carved out with a switchblade and _short breaths short breaths short breaths_. He bites down on the inside of his his lip so hard he tears through skin and it's like his whole mouth is flooded with hot, metallic wet.

He's on the cusp between Hell and _dying slowly_ when he regains enough unoccupied headspace to remind himself to hit back. He doesn't, then something's really wrong. "What the hell was that for!" he grates out, each word smooth and uncadenced--factory-perfect. He swats blindly in Sam's general direction, nicks what feels like chin. "Oh. Let me guess. You hate me."

No, he's _scared_ , idiot. Sammy was scared, like Dean should've been. And Dean had been, at first. He'd thought about Sam driving straight into the divider, head first. Neck snapped back at a right angle. But he'd yelled jump and Sammy hadn't, and he felt the cart wheels lock as the wire basket made first contact, felt it start to spin out, and he just let himself fly, because it was all over, anyway.

But Sammy's looking at him now, the glaze of betrayal in his eyes _I hate you I hate you I hate you_ , and he's still scared. _Should've kept you safe; I'm sorry._ "Dean, you--"

"Don't--don't touch me. Just don't move. And tonight, don't climb all over my side of the bed, for once. Mr. Tentacles." And Dean cracks a grin. _C'mon, Sammy._ Dean thinks about lying flat, and he considers not sleeping ever again. "Don't worry. It'll be cool." It's just a dull ache, he's careful how he moves. He can live with that.

Just bury it. Bury it under the sound of hot rain drumming against the roof of the Impala--didn't beat the storm. Bury it under "Hey, scoot out and tell dad to get dinner--bag of pretzels (Dean thinks about chewing) or...Hostess or something." Bury it under Sammy's satisfaction.

They grind to a halt in Lusk, Wyoming, under the pretense of that satisfaction. Dean isn't sure how he's supposed to maneuver from the car to the ground to the motel room, and so feigns sleepiness. Takes it slow.

Doesn't matter, because Dad throws the duffle, heavy with newly-purchased goods, at his person the second he clears the car door. "Catch!"

Off-guard, Dean gives a gasp of surprise; doubles over with the slicing, ripping pain this invites. The duffle knocks him to the ground a moment later.

He wonders if this counts as a catch.

He hopes so. (He thinks, he'd watched some kids play baseball, once. Spied them in the adjoining vacant lot, right through a chain link fence. Wasn't too special, but he and Sam played a real game broadcast, Red Sox v. Tampa Bay, which made it better.

Kid runs headlong into the guy with the mask and the mitt (unfair advantage, really, so it the runner justified in bowling the guy over? absolutely). Dust clears and both kids are on the ground, but Mask n' Mitt's got the ball in his glove still, and the runner is out. _Out._ And Dean thinks--)

Dean wants out.

The rest is blessedly vague, involves picking bits of asphalt out of his hair for what felt like a week. Feels like abuse, when Dad wrenches up his shirt, finds what Dean later discovered was a white-green-yellow bruise the size of Texas. He can't help wet, sticky tears in the wet, sticky air when Dad brushes his fingers down Dean's torso and it feels like he's driving the knife in, straight down to the hilt.

Then Dad _carries_ him, right past the front desk and the people waiting in line for the phone, like he's a baby, and between the pain and the sheer mortification of this, Dean could die then and there. 

Sammy tags after, tripping on Dad's heels, dragging a too-big duffle behind him. Dean doesn't know if it makes Sam look grown up, or just stupid-little, like clogging around in Dad's shoes. _You can't fill those._

Dean just knows that the way Dad is carrying him isn't as gentle as Dad thinks. It drags at his ribs and Dean gets the feeling he retches like he wants to, he'll be hacking up more than just his lungs.

Dad sets him in a chair, and gets ice from Sammy, from the ice machine. He gets a version of their little parking lot adventure from Sammy, too.

Dad isn't happy.

But more than that, it's the way Dad looks at him. Frames Dean's head with his hands--hands, big and strong and clammy--in some attempt to convey a feeling beyond words. Dean knows those hands, knows that look, knows those eyes. Seen it on Sam's face, back in Nebraska. And even before that, on Dad's, _that night when--_

When Dean had tried so hard to make it good. Make it right. Make it so's _gonna be okay_. But the look on Dad's face screams, _I can't trust you._

I can't trust you to keep safe. To be safe.

I can't protect you.

Screams _fear._

 

**doorways (ii).**

 

"Going on a little roadtrip, kid. See, we need to orchestrate an old-timey family reunion."

Dean's hesitation must be rimmed with neon, because whatever Andrew Kimmel is now--demon, he says; what the hell does that mean, _demon_ \--whatever Andrew Kimmel is now, it puts a soft point right through the Man in the Outback Hat at the spot where his neck joins his skull.

"You're gonna want to be there for this. You can't imagine what it'd do to your daddy if he never found your body."

Never really considered that.

Should have.

Reallyreally should have.

Andrew Kimmel lunges over what is now The Body in the Outback Hat and cops a feel around Dean's midsection, yanks him clear off the ground in one sweet motion. Dean swears he can feel his bones grind together, his ribs just crumble to dust, but that particular incident is far in the past.

He's carried out sideways like a limp sack, and if that doesn't look suspicious as all hell, he can see why there aren't many who gave him and Dad a second glance when they first rolled in. TOURIST KIDNAPPED BY CRAZY UNDERWORLD CREATURE--one for the Weekly World News.

This is. Beyond. Just so _beyond_ he can't even-- 

He makes a play at hooking his heel into the small of Andrew Kimmel's back, but Andrew Kimmel doesn't feel it, or doesn't care enough to comment. This is probably the point where Dean's mouth starts going at it without his brain, because he can hear the (taste the) words spewing forth, though he has absolutely no clue what he's saying. _If this is Fortress, are you Father Christmas?_\--that kind of thing. But he can't stop, and he just doesn't want to, because this is so beyond anything, he just can't bring himself to care. Andrew Kimmel doesn't say where they're headed or what for; really doesn't talk much at all, and Dean's filling in the gaps with absolutely anything and everything--things he can think of and things he's sure he's very definitely _not_ thinking. Just things. Stupid, stupid things. _Don't scare from things you can't fix._

And that's just it. Dean Winchester is nine years old. More than half his life, he's known how awfully terribly real monsters are. How real death is. More than half his life, he's known how to keep 'em at bay, how to hide, learned maybe a little on how to defend--though that's always a last dich thing. You're close enough to shoot a thing, it's as good as having its teeth in you already. He's learned that much.

Dean Winchester is nine years old, and his daddy isn't here to save him. Dean Winchester is nine years old, and he doesn't have a brother near enough to save. Dean Winchester is nine years old, and he is going to die. Gonna be his blood mixed in with the sand, _his_ insides sizzling out in the bare Nevada desert, his clothes thrown into the brush and his bones scattered all down the highway.

After that, everything just flatlines.

 

**(not) alone in the attic.**

 

The dust picks up in flurries, and Sam can feel his nose prick, redden. He sneezes. Brings the cuff of his shirt to his face instinctively.

The window is open. He can see the old red kite bobbing on the old grey tree outside. The breeze is cold. The fear waking in his stomach is cold. He can feel it leaking into his motionless arms and legs, the way ice water does when you swallow down too much, too fast. _(I'll race you, says Dean, and the cup is at his lips and tipping. Sam uses a straw.)_

He can't move.

The woman does. She circles him, like the V-winged birds in Las Cruces (was that May?) "I can't believe we missed one," she says. Her lips blossom into a pout. She looks like a doll, dressed in her Sunday best. "Not you, Sammy, don't worry. We would never forget you."

The fear starts pooling and warming, awkward and tepid like Sam's not sure whether it is the appropriate response or not. She looks like a Church lady, maybe one of Pastor Jim's friends. She smells like old eggs. But what is she missing? He considers the Sunday School they have sometimes. Dean never let them go, even though they read books and played games and ate those pink and white animal cookies from the store. Ate them with milk. _We would never forget you._

"Sorry about the smell," she says, and Sam uncrinkles his nose, looks away. "Blue Earth Bath and Body was closed today, so sue me. Figures that your mommy's friends'd live in backwater Minnesota."

Sam keeps quiet. His world is Dean and Bobby and Pastor Jim and sometimes Dad. He doesn't know about Mommy's friends.

"He's the only one who didn't come to see you, you know. When you were born."

_He didn't come and find you._

"It's probably what saved him, honestly. We hit every single name on that baby registry."

Sam doesn't understand, not really. He doesn't understand what this woman is trying to say. Not knowing all of these things makes him feel small and stupid, and he doesn't want to talk to her. But the way her lips curl back and her teeth comb against her tongue, the way she comes closer every time she rounds back to face him, like she's getting ready to land--that makes the fear freeze all over again. He doesn't move.

It's like she senses his uncertainties. "We _killed_ them, Sammy. Do you know what that means?"

Sam has his suspicions. They never talk about Mommy that way, but she's not here. Not anymore. Maybe she was killed. (Like when the car stalls and Dad kills the engine and everything stops, and Dad swears and rages and clangs away under the hood, while Sam and Dean eat bologna sandwiches on the side of the road. They pick out the pieces of gravel and dirt that fly in when people drive past.) 

"It means they can't protect you anymore. Speaking of--" And she pauses directly in front of him. Her shoes, round and black and shiny, nudge at his socks. She puts her hands on her knees, skirt smooth and tight against her legs, the way grown up ladies do when they talk to him. Just like tap-dancing Mrs. Aliza Gallagher, minus the crocodile clothes.

"Where's your Daddy?"

The smile makes up for it. She's so close, he can count her crocodile teeth.

Sam doesn't start crying until he feels her breath on his face. It smells like the restaurant candies that come striped red or green, and sometimes blue. He doesn't notice at first, because his eyes are wet from the dust and the sneezing, but when he tries to breathe, he gets a mouthful of that peppermint smell. He can smell the old eggs right under it, and it just seems _wrong._

Not enough air.

He hiccups and draws another shuddering breath.

It whines on its way out. The woman just stares, then frowns. Like she doesn't know what to do.

Dean is like that, he thinks. When Sam cries, that's when Dean is most like Dad. Dean steps back and looks in the other direction, as though he doesn't know what Sam is doing, what he's feeling. Sam tries his hardest not to ever cry.

He tries to take a deep breath.

Dean always says there's nothing to be afraid of. And maybe there isn't. 

_(--Doesn't mean you're not three whole years old when you wake up one night, needing the bathroom, and you find your big brother sitting on the edge of the bed with a rifle napping in his arms. When you think, well, why _shouldn't_ you be afraid? if he's got a gun, like Dad has._

_Because isn't _he_?_

_It's 2:47 time (which is easy, because the numbers are all laid out in flat, fluorescent green, and not sitting in a circle, like usual) when Dad comes back. He checks in with Dean, wordless; Sam isn't facing the right way and can't see, but Dean slips into bed beside him. They both pretend to sleep._

_Dad bangs around in the bathroom until 3:52 time. He's always thirsty when he comes home late. Sam always lines up the brown, white, black bottles behind the bathroom door, come morning._

_He still needs the bathroom._

_And maybe Dean needs it too. Sam can hear him sniffling, like maybe he's getting sick. But it comes with that same shuddering, hiccuping breathing Sam knows; and he knows that Dean is crying._

_Sam wets the bed that night. He needs the bathroom, but the bathroom is busy. He needs the bathroom, but it fees wrong to hear Dean crying. It feels like he should close his ears and turn away. That's what everyone has always done. Everyone Sam knows._

_In the morning, Dean is far from pleased to discover the wet spot on the sheets they're sharing, and Sam is uncomfortable and itchy in his last pair of underwear all the way to Scranton. Dad doesn't notice either way._

_Sheets cover over two secrets--one Dean's and one Sam's--and these things, they leave behind._

_When Sam cries, Dean doesn't ever stop him. He just doesn't hear it.)_

So maybe this girl is different, after all. "What's wrong with you?" she asks. Demands, even. "You don't know them."

Sam nearly objects, of course he knows them, he spends every day with them (except today), and they are Dean and Dad. Of course he knows them. 

"Your daddy didn't get on with Mommy's friends, much. Even after he learned the truth. They probably hadn't seen you since you were pink and sagging and toothless," the lady clarifies ( _that's_ what she thinks this is about). But Sam's thought is planted already, and growing. 

Growing.

It's then he realizes that he's still crying.

The lady leans forward and drops a kiss on Sam's forehead. It's a TV kiss, quick and chaste and insubstantial--but the only kind Sam knows. "You don't have to be afraid of anything," she says. Cuts a line down his neck with her fingernail. Her eyes are bright with fancy. "Everyone's got their eyes on _you._ "

Which doesn't sound right, but it doesn't sound bad, either. Sam sniffles.

"Do you like french fries?" the lady asks.

Yes, nods Sam. Yes, he does.


	7. Chapter 7

**the ballad of simon and rita (i).**

 

Simon Walker is newly dead. (He will never be newlywed, but she told him this months ago. That much isn't news.)

Simon Walker is newly dead, and his corpse is so fresh it still smells like a human being. Even in this heat--late August, a Sunday afternoon just edging into evening reds. His blood's not a rich crust on the ground, but liquid still. Pool's getting bigger, so he's not even done bleeding out. He's face down, skull crushed all to hell, flecks of bone (shouldn't be there) in his hair. She can't see much else, but she's seen enough.

Remembers Jerry Walker, Simon's kid brother, spring of '85. He'd slit his inner thighs, bled out on the family toilet. Seen her first dead body that day--same as all the rest of the neighborhood. She remembers all the blood. Never seen a murder before today, though. Mess is all the same, but for one thing.

John Winchester's boots track wet prints all inside the store, and he's still there when Rita finds them.

 

\--

 

"This isn't what it looks like, Rita." John kicks a canister used to be full of salt, and he has no trouble empathizing with the weary uncertainty of its roll. Circles and loops--no forward progress. Salt's a pink slush on the ground, too little, too late.

He's not going to bother telling her more; he had a choice, he'd wish it was exactly what it looks like. World's exactly what it seems. Wishes he was the worst thing in this town. Not a good streak of happenstance by any estimation, but not near so bad as what he's beginning to suspect.

Fifteen minutes prior, and Simon Walker was still mostly alive. _Thought you'd be back, Winchester,_ he'd said, which isn't ever a good thing to hear. At best, means you fucked up and Bobby's barking at you from behind a bent screen door, waiting to grudgingly accept whatever mini-mart apology you've got warming in the back seat. When today your name is Richard Fainall, it's considerably worse.

Simon Walker's expression is truly reptilian when John slips through the door, barrel first. "Expected you a little sooner, actually. Hear you had a run-in with the authorities. You keep waving a gun on very first date, people're going to think you're some kind of _freak._ "

"Heard you'd been here a while," John replies, and if he is nonplussed he is determined not to show it. "Jim Beatty, huh? Interesting he's running around lately. Though there'd be a policy about trips topside." He doesn't make a habit of drawing conversation out of his marks (or anyone else, for that matter), but he's never been one-on-one with an outright demon before. Smart bet to draw things along as best he can.

If that's what this is. Simon's (last name, 'SAYS: Shut up and buy something; Thank you for Shopping at Beatty Mercantile') eyes pool dark as an oil slick, and John's thinking that's as hard as proof comes in this business.

"Please. As if I'd answer a crossroads call. That's whores' work; some of us have standards, even in Hell." Even as he lays out the words, Simon's movement is all seduction, not unlike a black widow's courtship dance. "Borderlands, Winchester. You know you were thinking it. Hell's Gate? The American West is an amazingly literal place. You _had_ to be thinking it. It helps your little thought process any, things make the jump all the time. Wriggle up topside when the moon is right, or God's not looking, or--well. Fuck if I know. Jim's just a soul out of hell; doesn't even know it. No a demon yet, unfortunately. But a ghost? He couldn't be so lucky. Don't tell me you're surprised this happens. So many people like you, Hell's burstin' at the seams. Someone like Jim swimming at the edges slips out and...we follow him."

John doesn't have time for this. "Your kind are all the same to me."

"Oh really?" Simon flashes a smile, white teeth and crinkles at the edges of black eyes. "I'd have pegged you for a more personal type. You've got a vicious streak a mile wide when it comes to 'my kind,' and I'm supposed to believe you're on some selfless, holy crusade? I'm sorry, baby, but _your_ kind don't work that way. Besides... A while back all the wires in Hell were vibrating a little message, talked about something big going down, made you a hunter. 

"Wanna talk about that?"

John flips the safety on Dean's (because it's his, isn't it; some tacit coming-of-age rite John had missed which proclaimed, Dean is your son, he's a hunter, and this is _his_ ) gun and aims squarely at Simon's skull. Means _No_.

"How long have you been hunting, Winchester?" Simon asks, and there's a girlish trill to his voice. "'Cause I'm guessing five years. December twenty-third, you ship out and you never look back. It's funny, see, because me? I've been hunting you since around then, too. Coincidence, you think? Been hunting you and your little baby boy. Off and on. I'm not obsessed. _I_ have other priorities, see. Speaking of which. Where is your little hellspawn?"

"Not anywhere you'll find him." John keeps the gun trained on Simon.

"Oh," says Simon, and he purses his lips; tight little frown. "We know little Sammy's not here. You know, you weren't supposed to leave him. All _alone_ , especially."

You're telling me, John thinks.

"We can work around that; we'll find him, don't you worry. But I was talking about Dean." Everything rocks, rolls, and crashes. "Hear tell he's quite the kicker!"

John shakes, though every part of him wishes he hadn't. It isn't much--is almost nothing, really; tremor down his arms and through the tips of his fingers--but Simon smiles anyway.

"We need Sammy's whereabouts, see. We found you, but we need the whole three-piece set if we want our gold star. Oh, don't glare at me like that; it's nothing you wouldn't like. I promise you I wouldn't dream of splitting a single hair on his head--I just want to see the little prince for myself." Wink. "So, we'll give you Dean... and all I need in return is an address. You don't even need to deliver. But think fast, Winchester; we find what we're looking for on our own and your one bargaining chip doesn't mean a whole lot to us, see? Hell's Gate at sundown, what do you say?"

Why, John asks. And Simon, coy and toothsome and slippery, won't say. Instead, he says, "Because that's when the gate opens, sweetheart. There's others looking for Sammy and believe me, they don't play by the same rules as I do. I don't play well with them, so if you think about how nice I am, think of what _they_ are. Something tells me you know a good deal when you smell one."

John smells a trap, is what he smells. Simon doesn't bother convincing him otherwise; doesn't nudge him away from his own machinations, either. John's not sure if it's carelessness, or a pure and simple challenge.

He's not sure it matters. Whatever's stirring in Beatty has them by the throat, and it's never gonna just let go.

"You know, John--something I also heard, while perusing the wires. Dean's not such a big fan of flying, is he?" says Simon, lips puckered with a mockery of parental concern. "Do you think it's the crashing he's afraid of, or the never coming down?"

Hell's Gate at sundown, duly noted.

John unloads rounds into Simon Walker 'til there's nothing left of his face but wrecked sinews and a red spray across the back wall.

When the onslaught breaks, Simon screams. Lunges forward.

 

**the ballad of simon and rita (ii).**

 

It's April in Nevada. Warm already, but not the baked outsides and sweat-slicked insides that come with summer proper. Gonna be a scorcher, when it comes--plumajillo and sage that line the road are already greying and limp against cracked earth. Rita swears she can see the steam rise from the pavement in front of Simon Walker's place, darkened with hosewater that morning.

She pulls open the screen door and pushes in the wooden one. Makes a screech like the kind you hear down alleyways in big city movies. In the movies, the neighbors in the flats above shout, _shut the fuck up, cunt!_ as the woman is ravaged, and swept into a dumpster with the next morning's trash.

In Rita's life, which is not at all a televised crime drama (it's Beatty; it's Beatty, and nothing happens in Beatty, Nevada), Simon Walker's been schooled well enough not to say anything like that. But he swears at the screen door, and swears he'll fix it. He doesn't. Then Rita follows him through the maze of trash he calls furniture, heirlooms, and suchlike. Every afternoon (afternoons are slow at the diner; Rita works all night, and nighttime sex is for romantics only), he swears he'll give her the time of her life. Fucking time of her life.

Sometimes he does.

That is the story of Rita and Simon, as Rita tells it.

The wedding was just a formality. She didn't want it; neither did he. Lord knows her mother didn't. The day Simon lays waste to all those plans, and the gold rings, and the white lace, and the Pandora sandwiches--it's a blessing.

It is.

 _It is_ , she repeats, because Richard Fainall's got his eyes locked on hers, like he can see the lies tumbling from her mouth. Richard Fainall's still got blood on his shoes. She doesn't owe him anything, least of all the truth. But maybe. Maybe. She owes it to herself.

This is the final chapter of the story of Rita and Simon, last April in Beatty, Nevada. Rita takes a breath.

It starts with the screen door. Simon doesn't go a-screeching after that door, which in retrospect is the first sign. The second is the smell of new sweat. Simon's place is trash and the refrigerator tends only to work during the odd months, but sweat is something Simon Walker doesn't tolerate.

_Sit on the towel, babe. Can't have anyone sweating into the upholstery. Gen-u-ine leather._

_Maybe if we got the window open--_

_Air resistance, darling. Air res_ -ist- _ance._

Gen-u-ine leather and air res- _ist_ -ance; that's Simon Walker.

Not this.

It's a long, narrow hallway, lined with boxes and shelves of things never got fully unpacked. It's a dark, narrow hallway, which memory stretches into eternity.

Richard Fainall's got that look in his eye again. _Keep going._ Same look he uses on his kid--and maybe Rita should be offended, him treating her like that, when he's the one with blood on his shoes. (She keeps staring.) But it's the same look made the kid look a shade over thirty, in between looking miserable and looking nine, so Rita's not sure how to take it.

She makes it through this tale, Richard Fainall's gonna tell her everything; she'll make sure of that.

End of the hallway, door's ajar. Room's spewing sulfur and salt, something septic and something smells a little like sex.

Inside, Simon's got his hands wrapped around some stranger's cock. She can see the cum, dried and cracking at the corner of his mouth. The lube, sticky between that _fucking stranger's_ thighs.

Simon doesn't have the decency to look surprised.

Who've we got here, Rita asks. Who've _you_ got. She's never been stunned into silence and she's not about to start now. It's her waitress voice--the one she uses when folk entertaining out-of-towners stop by the diner and the Stagecoach. Impersonal. Professional.

Brother, of sorts, he claims. Simon splays himself supine, twists in the off-white of this sheets. His neck cranes-- _sex_ \--and his hips rock-- _sex_ \--and his lips pull taut as he smiles wide, wide wide. "Tell me, Rita girl. You believe in the Devil?"

Rita's a good girl. All things considered, Rita's a good girl. "I assuredly do now."

"Good." Then he's up, so fast she hardly sees him. She wonders how he did that; she wouldn'ta let him get that close. _How did he do that?_ But she puts the throught from her mind when she feels his wide, wide smile at her neck. His fingers press against her nape, so deep she swears her vertebrae bruise. "Faith like that might save you someday."

She leaves in a hurry, and that is the end of Simon and Rita. Almost.

Rita goes back to work, and so does Simon. The boy (or the man, or the thing, with the lube and the cum all between his legs) is found in a dumpster, back in Carson City. Neck broken, pants down, and--it's the strangest thing--near a quart of salt stuffed down his throat. (Rita keeps looking down at Richard Fainall's boots, crust of pink blood-salt slush hardening at the edges, now. _Where were you last April?_ she asks. Nebraska and Wyoming, he tells her, on beat and matter of fact.)

That's when she files for the restraining order. She doesn't have proof, so she keeps her mouth shut, but things like that are too close and too strange for Beatty; coincidences don't take well in a town like this.

"Rita, this is very important." Voice strained.

Richard Fainall stands up, and Rita steps back.

_"Rita."_

"Just tell me who you really are. Why you're here. Tell me everything."

Richard Fainall sighs, like he doesn't have time for her peace of mind. Paces, agitated. "I'm headed to California with my boy. Got a stint waiting for me in Oakland. That's all you need to know."

Rita's about to object, when he says: "But I can tell you. Simon on the ground there, Simon back in April--hell, Simon _all summer_ "--which he says like he doesn't quite believe it himself--"That's not the man you thought it was."

"Figured as much."

They stand silent for a spell.

"And you're certain that kid, the one in the Dumpster, is the only thing he talked to?"

Rita wouldn't know. She stopped keeping track.

"Rita, we need to go. We need to go right now. Hell's Gate--just west of here, right?" Even the question is a command.

We're not going anywhere, says Rita. Nobody's going anywhere, they're gonna stay right here, right here in the shop 'til Jenny comes and fixes everything. Nobody, not anywhere. _We're not going anywhere._

"Listen to me, Rita. There's not a speck of gas in this town right now, and we need to get out to that gate. No, you stay right there, and you _listen_ \--you will _not_ walk out on me. There's something here, something used to be in Simon Walker; it's moving fast, and it's after my boys. We're _going_ to that gate. Every moment we spend thumbing around here is one we don't--"

Rita nods. _Fine._ She gives up. She doesn't know how to argue anymore; doesn't know if she even wants to.

Just-- _fine._ "Jus' lemme get the keys. Simon has--he had... There's a motorcycle out back. I'll take you to Hell's Gate."

He lets her disappear into Beatty Mercantile's back office. Little plants lining the crusted window are all dead, limp as the plumajillo in April. Keys are on the desk.

So is the phone.

Rita dials red, button neatly marked in Simon's hand as PANIC EMERGENCY HELL ON EARTH. "Jenny, I need you out in Hell's Gate. I know the gas doesn't come for an hour. Just get there. It's important."

 

**fear (iii)**

 

John hasn't ridden since--hell, since before the war, maybe. And even then, all he'd done was test-run the bike Daniel Miller's old man had brought into the shop. (Daniel Miller put that bike through the iron siding of some highway up in Iowa a year or two later. They'd made a bet about death just before shipping out, Danny to Iowa Tech and John to Quang Nam. John won.)

In any case, before Mary. She'd tolerate a lot--indulge a little herself--but motorcycles were the kind of things fell under _Not on Your Life, John Winchester._ She'd known Daniel Miller, too. And John thought, She's afraid. 'Fraid everyone who gets on one is gonna crash. And he thought, it's safe. Danny's just a damned fool, always has been. It's safe when you're careful.

Turns out it's not. 'The Truth' is a lot of things. Got started on it with Missouri, learned the more pertinent details from Jim Murphy, in Minnesota. Learned the kind of things you tell a guy before you marry him. Woulda taken her either way, of course, but _he needed to know_. (And maybe he could have--)

The truth is this: Mary was a great hunter, quiet like the Kansas High daddy's girl she was, but ever-vigilant. And she was always, always careful. The truth is this: It didn't matter.

And so now John thinks, maybe fear is the appropriate response, because it keeps you ready, and keeps you watchful. That and vengeance, because something ain't right in the world, it has to be met with fear. Fear keeps his arms 'round Rita's waist as she speeds out through empty Nevada, winding around stunted brush and glittering spines of broken glass, and keeps his thoughts anywhere but. Fear is envisioning Blue Earth, mysteriously devoid of one Sam Winchester. That's the kind of fear gets put away, because there's a thousand miles between them, and there's nothing John can do. Fear is hoping to high hell demons don't lie.

Dry, mirthless chuckle.

There's a thousand different outcomes, every second breeding more. What if Dean and his captors are past the stateline? What if that scrub out left isn't a bush, but a child? What if they never left Beatty? What if 'someone else' has already got Sam (he's missing, missing, missing)? What if the demons give Dean back in pieces? He taught him best he could, but there's a difference between remembering to lay down salt at night, and putting down a demon.

Those are the kind of thoughts that get put away. Don't scare from things you can't fix, Winchester. Go deal with your demons.

In the end, that's all you can ever do.

"Rhyolite," says Rita, and her words are nearly lost to the wind.

They pass a garden of white giants, granite women and calcified ghosts. They edge northwest. The sun is hot, turning red; John tries not to think about sunset.

"Old Town," says Rita, some time later. Six, seven ghost towns, they pass. Like the life was sucked right out of the walls and roofs, feeding the dark things that lurk in the desert. "Cat's Trail," she says. They wind inward.

John doesn't know if she's playing tour guide on his behalf, or if she's just trying to orient herself. Out here, it could swing either way. He knows he's surprised and turned around, when he sees Beech Duchess 76 sitting out there, happy as a clam. She's looking a little dustier, maybe a little sun-bleached, but she hasn't lost any of her sass. John can tell just by looking at her. "There," he says. Rita swerves uncertainly, and he repeats, "There, by that plane. That's the place." _Beech Duchess 76. Please supply identifying information._

The radio's still droning. (No, she hasn't lost a bit of sass; not one bit. It's good to know at least one thing hasn't been blown to hell just yet.)

The motorcycle drags to a halt with some uncertainty, and John unwraps himself from Rita's waist. "This yours?" she asks. "Pretty little number."

Time for work.

John scours his pockets first, and then the inside of the plane--for anything of use. There's a little brown journal taped under the pilot's seat that John is pleased to find still there.

"What are we looking for?" asks Rita. Her lips are full and red, puckered with unease. _Don't wanna be here,_ they plead. _Don't wanna be here at all._ But contrary to classic circumstance, safest place in a hundred mile radius is probably right here.

Hell's Gate.

Is this yours, what are we looking for, what are we doing. She's as inquisitive as Sam. "We work fast," is all John supplies. Turns back to the plane's insides. Back of the plane there's a taped up box, labeled Sienna De Santos, OAKLAND. Rosaries inside, the color of bays and oceans. John thumbs the beads. Could work, maybe. String them all together. "Need to make this." John flips to a dog-eared page of the journal. It's a drawing, a Devil's Trap. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but Beatty's not home to the first demons topside, and John has adequate reason to believe the trap's sound.

(If he does it proper.) He's looking at the page and fingering the beads, and Rita says: "You ain't gonna use those to make that thing."

Is that so?

"You're not going to drag me out to _Hell's Gate_ and snip up a bunch of rosaries! Forgive me for not ascribing to your heathenism. To me, that sounds like a bad idea. To _me_ , that sounds sacreligious."

"You don't know the half."

Rita sidesteps his baited reply, and stands firm. "And I don't aim to. All I know is you're not going to do it."

John sighs. He drops down from inside the plane, and Rita steels herself like she's expecting a tousle. John walks right past her and examines Simon Walker's motorcycle.

Gas tank would work. It would spill like all hell, but it would work. (Pop finally kills his cigarettes when he goes to deal with the ding in Daniel Miller's gas tank. He works buck-naked from the waist down. Shower smells like gasoline for a week. So does Pop, but that's nothing new. Gasoline and cig smoke.)

John doesn't strip down; he just lets it soak into his jeans (and there's a flash, some sideways moment in time, where it feels like blood). Circles the plane with a shaky Devil's Trap. Line for line out of the journal--he checks, double checks. It's his first.

"You're making it seem like we're not going back, throwing all my gas out into the dirt." She's given up on questions, John notes.

"Rita." He's under the plane, squirting chords across the circle. "Rita, you promise me--whatever you see. Whatever you see, you try your damndest to forget after tonight. Just put it away and go back to Beatty, get on with life." You stray too far and you can't ever go back.

"You put us in your rearview first, and I assure you, forgetting'll be my first priority." If aught else, Rita seems comfortable with this one item in John Winchester's Life Philosophy.

Trap's done. Now it's just the waiting. Shadows are longer, and the dust is bathed in red.

"Does Dean know? About all this?"

She knows the answer to that. John wipes the gasoline from his palms onto his jeans. The attempt leaves black streaks in both places, doesn't do much to help his cleanliness.

"And Sammy?"

"What do you know about Sammy?" Honestly, sometimes he can't believe that kid. He leaves Dean a couple hours and some waitress knows their family history? But then, he supposes 'some waitress' Rita has ceased to be. After all, she trusts the man who killed her boyfriend who was possessed by a demon who fucked a stranger who died in Carson, with salt jammed down his throat. Generally speaking, things tend to come unhinged somewhere down the line.

Rita laughs. "Not much. I frankly can't remember what's been heard and what's been filled in by yours truly. Thought he was a drug runner for a while. One of your ring, bailed out on you--you were yellin' on the phone, said he was gone."

John snorts. Little drug runner Sammy. It almost makes his being missing less offensive. (Trust Jim Murphy; he'll do you right. He'll do you more right than you have ever done him.)

"And then, he's actually your boy, isn't he? Your other one."

John nods.

"Sodapop Curtis?"

"What?"

"Never mind. The Outsiders. It's a book--and a movie, I think. 'Bout kids."

John gets the impression that 'kids' has a more specific definition than she's letting on.

"Dean looks up to him, huh?"

Now John's lost. "What?" he repeats.

"His brother."

A grin cracks open on John's face. "Maybe someday, maybe someday. Sammy's gonna be tall, I can tell. Right now, he's five years old, and he's the one looking up to anything that moves. But he knows his clocks and his calendars and maybe how to read a little. Dean'd probably look up to him if he could remember how _he_ was at five."

Rita laughs, bright and full, like they're not sprawled in the dirt and covered in grease and gas; like they're not waiting bait for demons, at the mouth of Hell's very own gate (or one of them; there's one in Texas, he knows. Maybe Wyoming). "Is he, now." She's picking at the brush, plumajillo and sage like the rest of the area. "Your boy treats him like a safety net, seems like, so I just assumed."

"Yeah, well. I told him, 'keep him safe.' Everything goes so far south it ain't coming back, just keep him safe. Just that one thing."

Rita looks at John. She's reading too much into what he said. He continues: "So, no. Sammy doesn't know. Not yet." Maybe it'll all be over, before he needs to. Maybe it ends here. (Deep down: _You can't ever go back.)_

"Must be nice. The not having to know, but still having people to protect you."

John's not so sure. He'd want to know. There has to be a fire-and-brimstone lining to the world, he'd want to know. But maybe he's wrong. He looks at Rita, and he thinks, _You're a waitress in Nevada, coulda gotten married._ He thinks of Sammy, and it's _You're four, shooting off a Nebraska hill in a shopping cart; you're just a kid._

Thinks of Dean, and it's just, _I'm sorry._

Rita sighs. Folds her hands into her lap and waits for sunset.

 

**our fathers.**

 

Flash of red, in Jim Murphy's peripheral vision.

The kite, the kite that's been stuck up there who knows how long--a couple seasons at least (got lost in the spring foliage, and Jim thought it had gone; come the end of August, the tree starts shedding early, and there it is again, bright red against greying sky). The kite comes falling down, crowned with leaves. Sam Winchester comes down after it.

Heart palpitations aren't exactly an exaggeration. _Sorry, John, I dropped your kid out a second-story window._ The panic, which rages in his ears like an August downpour on sheet metal ceilings, relents when he realizes Sam isn't falling, but being carried.

He watches as a girl slips down from the last branch, hears the crunch of leaves (and not the crunch of bones) and she lands them both with inhuman grace.

_Monstrous grace._

Panic's back.

The stairwell screams. Jim flies.

 

\--

 

The door slams, and Sam gasps. The girl--call me Ruby, she says--tenses her hold on Sam's hand. He's familiar with the signal. _Whatever happens, we're good. I'm here._ But it doesn't feel right, if it's not Dean's hand. (Soft, fleshy fingers. Shiny nails. These are not Dean's hands.)

When Pastor Jim rounds the corner, Sam is nearly happy to see him, the morning's morbidity almost forgotten.

"I found him," says Ruby. "Don't worry."

Pastor Jim says nothing. Ruby keeps hold of Sam's hand. Sam doesn't move.

"We were just going out for french fries, weren't we, Sammy?"

"Sam doesn't like french fries," says Pastor Jim. "Dean does." (Truth is, Sam doesn't mind them. He just hates eating them in the silence of fast food joints in highway gas stops at midnight. It's Dean who tells Pastor Jim Sam doesn't like french fries, the one time he serves them. Ever since, Pastor Jim hasn't strayed once from peas and fancy ridged carrots. Sam feels guilty every time, on Dean's behalf, though he knows he shouldn't feel sorry about carrots.)

Pastor Jim turns his gaze to Sam. So does Ruby, though her expression is one of nearly comical digust. _You lied?_ Eyes pinched into an accusatory glare. Sam looks down at his shoes.

"What are you?" asks Pastor Jim. Back to Ruby. _What are you?_

Ruby draws a knife from her belt. It sends a jagged burst of raw fear through Sam all over again. The blood rushes to his fingers and his feet and his hand is hot in hers and she won't let go and his fingers are sweaty and his legs are panicking, _go go_ run--

"I sent a demon back to Hell in Carson City." She lets the sun run over the blade, turns cold steel to something warm, shimmering like water. It's etched with shapes and squiggly letters. "I am not little Sammy's enemy."

Sam is transfixed by the blade. Dean has one like that.

Sam does not think Pastor Jim is as impressed. Pastor Jim says: _"Christo."_

 

\--

 

The woman's eyes dilate matte black, flicker, and fade to their normal human shade of blue. She shrugs. "I said I wasn't Sammy's enemy. I didn't say anything about you."

She throws Sam back against the tree with a crash and a crackle of leaves. Flings herself forward with the momentum.

She's good with the knife, Jim will allow her that. Vertical slice, that could open man up from groin to ribs. The blade is razor-thin, invisible almost.

Jim dodges, feels the air as it skims past the billow of his vestments, and looks to Sam. Sam keeps himself prostrate in the nest of leaves, red and gold, spitting mulch from his mouth. As yet unharmed. Jim tries to close the distance between himself and Sam and the tree, but the demon is faster.

She has him by the shoulder, and wrenches him back before she draws in again with her knife. She is wary; never comes too close. Which is a boon to Jim, because her caution is overcaution. Precious little he had could hurt her.

The knife, though, is a curious object. He knows the symbols, at least in part. Occult, perhaps, but not demonic. That question again: _What are you?_

They circle, like water down a drain, and the sun follows, red into purple. It will be a cool night in Blue Earth.

Sam is quiet, his only noise his breathing. Staccato syncopation. His small shoulders are rigid with shock and incomprehension. Jim can't see much more.

The demon doesn't give him a chance.

Less wary, now. She floods in closer, all heat and power and sulfur.

(Precision, Jim.)

Jim catches her next blow at her wrist, and the force knocks the blade from her hand. She wrenches back instantaneously, Sam dragging behind.

Knife in hand. Jim regards her, lips thin-pressed, expression cool. She steps back. She cannot dodge near so well with Sam in tow, and she knows it.

Jim lets the knife fly.

The demon sets Sam free, but catches the knife with unperturbed ease. Stalks forward.

Jim steps back, back toward the house. Calves primed to run. Sam scrambles toward him on hands and knees. He's favoring one shoulder.

"Gonna run inside? To consecrated ground?" Her eyes are clear blue slits, and her pert smile looks all wrong on her face. "I'll spare you the story, but... You don't carry around a knife like this if you're small fry in Hell. After all... how many times has the Church saved anyone?"

"Sam," Jim whispers furiously. He should check, make sure the child is unharmed, but one look in his eyes, and he knows it's futile. Some things can't be unseen; all he sees in Sam's eyes is fear. "Sam, I need you to run inside and call--"

"Call?" says the demon. "Let me guess. John Winchester? Our savior, John Winchester? Hear tell he's halfway across the country, and not doing anyone any good. You know what I'm talking about, Sammy. Think about it."

" _Go_ , Sam."

A beat of hesitation.

_"Go."_

Sam goes. Pitter patter through the church foyer. Children's steps.

But Sam can't reach the phone, and he doesn't know the number, Jim realizes. _He can't do this._ And Jim cannot protect him.

It's like the demon can read his uncertainties. "Go ahead, pastor. Call him. Call John." She lets Sam run, keeps her focus on Jim. She could have followed, could have swept past, could have been long gone, into the red of the dying sun. But Jim gets the impression she's not quite done here (not anymore--not the way she's looking at him, hungry. French fries, thinks. How silly.). "Call him. Then he'll be able to hear you gurgle, just _bleed out_ , when I slit your throat."

Before Jim flees (gear in the basement; rack of gear in the basement, but none of it fit for her. It's time he needs, not weapons), he asks one thing: "What does the Devil want with Sam Winchester?"

Simple answer. "He's little Sammy Winchester. _Everybody_ wants him."


	8. Chapter 8

**fear (iv).**

 

Andrew Kimmel's got Dean under his arm, slung loose against his hip. John knows Dean's alive by the soft moan he makes as he's dropped to the ground.

Andrew Kimmel is different than what was inside Simon Walker--hasn't got sex sluicing off him. Just bare wire and jagged edges. "On time for once, Winchester--early, yet. I get the impression that ain't true too often. Should I be worried?" He knows a trap's waiting; just doesn't know where. But he's walking easy.

"We're meeting here on your terms; you start this off right, and you give me my boy." John feels like he should have a pistol level with Andrew Kimmel's head. Knows this is a different kind of evil. Still feels naked.

Andrew Kimmel is in his element. "You're not going to come get him?"

John won't be baited. No more than he already has been, he amends.

"Go on, Dean. Crawl over to your daddy."

John can see Dean has no intention of doing anything of the sort. _Stay put, John. Don't coddle our boys._

John swallows, then speaks: "Plane's got a thing called a black box, logs where it's been. Box'll take you back to the airstrip we set out from. It'll take you to Sam."

Dean shudders. _That boy's gonna be furious with you, Winchester._

Andrew Kimmel's not sure he should believe him.

"You can trust my word or you can trust my science. Don't know you put much stock in either, but I can tell you--box isn't near so creative, it starts thinking about ways to end you."

Andrew Kimmel's not moving so easy anymore. Decisions, decisions. He paces about, vulture-like, circling Dean (Dean is drawn up now, almost sitting. Keeps still like he's hurting somewhere). He must wonder where his partner's gone.

John thinks about Rita's beau and the stranger in bed. He'd nearly forgotten Rita. He turns to her now, but she is quiet. Just staring at Kimmel 'cause she's not sure what to make of that. She's no longer so thoughtlessly brave as to rush over to Dean. He thinks about a certain Jim Beatty and a certain street and a certain Miss Jenny Gardner and a certain assault arrest and he thinks, maybe she would've. A day ago, maybe she would've.

"You show me the box." Pace, circle. Panic. Didn't think demons did that.

"Check the plane yourself. It's actually orange-colored, that helps you any."

Kimmel shakes his head, no. No. Wants John to bring it out. _Show me_ , he says. You give it to me.

Dean has collected himself as well as can be expected. Ready to split, if John gives him the go-ahead. _Stay put._ It'd be like running from a mastiff, got you already in its jaws. John gestures pointedly at his son. "And why would I do that?"

Pause. Shift. More pacing. Nothing like Simon. "Not used to working alone?" says John.

Too far. Andrew Kimmel yanks Dean up by the collar, and Dean makes a sound like three kinds of pain. Rita starts, but doesn't move beyond that.

Andrew Kimmel throws ragdoll Dean to the back of Beech Duchess and begins to gut the plane. He finds two things, easy enough. The first is a bright, orange thing inside (John's not even sure it's got the information--radio's clearly shot; black box was probably never tested against interference from Hell). The second is the Devil's Trap, _outside._ He finds that the dark spilling out under the plane isn't all shadows. And he stares, registers its meaning slow, like he's sifting through the fine print.

"Son of a bitch." Mild disbelief.

Too young, thinks John. _Far_ too young, if he didn't see that coming. Maybe another decade or two. Andrew Kimmel snarls, lupine. John gives him a look, says _You try anything, and I will leave you to rot._ Imagine how long that trap's gonna last, in the bare stillness. Rain don't wash that away too quickly.

(The shower smelled like gasoline for a week.)

Andrew Kimmel regains his composure somewhat. Taunts. "Think this'll hold me, Winchester? Four years a hunter, against a millenia a demon--seniority rules."

"Four months topside?"--Rita. She's putting two with two, a manner to a body, a demon to a nightmare. If 'Winchester' threw her off from Richard Fainall, she doesn't care enough to make a scene of it. Her attention's all on Andrew Kimmel. "Been here since April, if I had to guess."

"Four months, two skins, and seven states," Andrew Kimmel allows. "Thirteen deaths and twice as many fucks, and nobody noticed a whit. 'Cept for you--sorry, doll.

"So you know what? Go ahead and leave me, Winchester; I've got plenty of time. There's nowhere I can't follow. I _will_ find you. Easy enough to track you down--even snipped you right out of the air, not too long ago."

John doesn't take kindly to feeling hunted. "Had a sudden notion a hunter'd be flying out over Nellis, did you?"

"Call it serendipity, it makes you sleep easier. But I think you'd be surprised just how many of our number are cutting our teeth on Americana. And we're all looking for you; and the only thing working in your favor? Demons don't do teamwork. I've got my one, and even that gets crowded. 

"Hell of a lot on your plate, Winchester. Pun unintended."

John ignores him. "I send you down, how long you think it'll take you to crawl back up?"

"You wouldn't."

That's where he's wrong. It comes to this fight, nothing is off limits. "Where you think I put your partner?"

"You'd be sorry if you did. Your wife--Mary, right? Not a soul alive knows more about pretty Mary Campbell than my sister. Do you some good, to talk a little. It's not a sin." Andrew Kimmel grins. "If you got the time. But see. You don't." Two, three seconds, and Andrew Kimmel's hugged snugly between the back passenger seats, Dean's renewed outbursts muffled beneath him. "You let me out, or I kill your boy.

"Don't worry; I'll let you watch."

They were ever gonna kill him, Dean'd be dead already. John knows this. Or the thinks he does. He's fairly certain. Rita's not so sure, if the way her eyes are juggling the demon and Dean, and John. Saccadic motion (and maybe they're asleep, and it's a bad dream, after all).

Finally, he draws Dean's gun. Says, "Try me."

 

\--

 

_Try me._

She can't see him, but she swears to God Dean wilts. It's like a charge goes out of the air.

_If he didn't want you getting into trouble, he'd be here watchin' you, right?_

But she has to trust Richard Fainall (or Winchester, perhaps; no one's what they say they are) as far as his business stretches. His boy and his demon and his little orange black box are on him.

Of course, some things are still on _her._

Rumble in the ground and the screech of sirens breaks the biting concentration with which might-be-Fainall and definitely-ain't-Kimmel regard each other. Patriotic smattering of color in the distance. Headlights flood their operation, paint the satanic markings under Fainall's plane in harsh relief. Jenny Gardner steps out, says there's more on the way, says it's over. Hands on the ground, no sudden movement.

Fainall slams Rita with a hard glare full of questions and accusation. _What the_ fuck _did you do?_

"What the hell you think you're doing!" He grabs her by the wrist, pulls her facing him. So close she can see the chap of his lips, taste the vitriol he spits in her face. "You _stupid_ \--" Stops. Gives her a jangling shake instead. Furious whisper, like wind 'round mountains. "I tell you there's something going 'round isn't human, and you call _her_? What'd you think she was gonna do? You think he's gonna get cuffed and processed, calm like that?"

She doesn't know what she was thinking. _I'm afraid of you,_ is what she was thinking. _Still afraid of you._ Rita's never seen someone so overtaken by fury--and that's every bar brawl she's ever split, every bad night she's bit with (air res- _ist_ -tance) Simon Walker.

Lean to his eyes is feral.

Lean to his eyes is _terrified_. "What the _fuck_ did you--"

"Hey!" Sharp chirp. "Give a lady a little respect," say Jenny, cutting between them. "Shoulda known you were trouble, Richard Fainall. Just can't stay away, huh?" She lights a Darium Black, releases the first plume of smoke into Fainall's face with a smack of her lips.

Rita hasn't ever known her to smoke.

"Wasn't appendicitis, you know. That killed Mrs. Clarisse Fainall. You ever heard of an Indonesian stomach curse?" And she's standing so close, she'd be atop, were she able. She steps back abruptly, and turns to the plane and the trap and the demon and Dean. Lets the clove slip from her fingers, fall to the ground (and maybe that's surprise).

Snaps her fingers. Whole ring goes up in flames, and much else besides. And Rita's certain it's not. Surprise, that is. Some part of her isn't all too shocked, either.

Jenny turns on them, her eyes full-black. Fucking day is going to hell.

"Plane's a lot smaller than a house, Winchester. You remember your house? Two stories. Tidy garden. Even-handed mortgage and two-thousand down payment. Shame the nursery went first--new white paint. Nice big house to start your little domestic fantasy. It burned to smoke and mirrors in forty-seven minutes.

"How long you think it'll take to gut the plane? But then. Your boy'd asphyxiate first, wouldn't he."

Richard Fainall-Winchester isn't seething any longer--just bruised, and for a second, dead lost. Looks a lot like his boy when Rita watched him leave the diner. (Right into the Devil's arms-- _you_ let him walk right in.)

Then he's still again. Gunpoint doesn't waver.

 _"John."_ Mock exasperation. "Don't point that at me again. I let you rip poor Simon all to pieces, but I think it's in both our interests not to do that again." She cups her breasts. "Jenny's getting married this December."

 _Try me._ Wordless this time, but no less distinct.

Hell-ain't-Jenny turns on Rita. You'd let him waste me, she accuses. Called me out here to die, and you knew it. Did you see what he did to poor old Simon Walker? You saw what was left of him, I'm sure. Pretty little thing. I prefer something a little finer, generally. More curves; less cock. That sort of thing.

Just keeps running her mouth, doesn't relent. "--swear I could feel him weep, every time I put his dick in something new. Because you know, it was the damnest thing. I could swear! _He really loved you."_

Hell-ain't-Jenny is buzzing with gleeful malice. Place is burning--and maybe Dean, too; she can't see. Richard Fainall's gonna shoot.

"And Rita." Smile, sway, seduction. "He's real sorry." It comes out like a laugh, and something in Rita rips. She feels a cool breath at her nape.

 

\--

 

Old Jim'd been gone just long enough to be forgotten. But John sees him now, sees him behind Rita. Collapses on her like he's seeking comfort.

Fuck. _Fuck._

John can see the end, suddenly. Bright and clear. End doesn't feature anyone but Jenny Gardner (who isn't even Jenny Gardner anymore). Rita drops like autumn, quick and cool and terrified.

Sun's gone now.

Fire's going strong.

 

\--

 

That's what he missed. That night, that's what he missed.

Dean hadn't heard his mother scream. He remembers that night in pieces, with memories like rag scraps. One is scorching red; another, the sound of his father's orders _alwayslistenalwayslisten._ The last is just pain--pain in in his hands and arms and elbows, because it's hot and he's lost and Sammy is heavy and Dad is scared.

He doesn't remember Mom being there at all.

But then, it always was her _not being_ that was problematic about that night. (He is lying in bed, riding out the last of the sudden panic that comes with waking from nightmares. He thinks he should call out for her, or snuggle into bed. He knows Dad is on the couch again, tonight. He also knows he won't do either, because he is four, and four is big enough to know it's gonna be okay, come morning. _It's all gonna be okay._ )

He would have remembered her scream. He knows it.

It would've sounded just like Rita's, now. Would've sounded high like fear and low like pain, shattered and shuddering like rag scrap memories, but strong, too--like it's the one sound keeping you sane. Like it cuts out, then it's all over, and you're lost.

Dean is already lost, and he knows it. But there's just not enough air.

It burns down his throat. It burns like everything else around him.

 

**counting prayers.**

 

Rita sees Simon. She sees the cum on his lips and then the blood on his cheeks; she sees him lying in bed with his little stranger, then him lying face-down, plastered sticky with red slush on the linoleum in Beatty Mercantile. She sees him in his fancy old car with the windows that make air res- _ist_ -ance and she sees him stalk and skulk and it's all over because

he's dead

(you're dying) in

one

two

three

 

\---

 

How long has it been? Not so long.

four

five

Sheepskin turns to thick black smoke when it catches fire.

Smoke turns to Andrew Kimmel when he swoops down, burning. Hands claw at Dean's throat.

Air turns to panic panic panic when the first runs out and the last boils over.

(six--!)

 

\--

 

Ruby grabs him again, when they're inside. Sam doesn't realize that's what it is at first, the pain in his shoulder is so sharp and the whip-around so quick.

She drags him by the shoulder when his feet fall out from under him, and he writhes like a kite-tail behind her.

There was a tire swing

seven

eight

months ago, in a park in a town with no children. Sam had never been to a park, but for

nine

ten

(when's dad coming back?)

days it was all theirs. Dean twisted it up with Sam sitting on the tire face, legs dangling through the center--twisted so much Sam was

one

two

feet off the ground, the rope all tight and contorted, looked like burrs on an oak tree. Then Dean let go and Dean jumped on and the whole world spun and never never stopped.

Like dying, it never

three

four

_(make it stop, Dean!)_

Dean heaves a bologna sandwich into a trash can after. Sam cries, he feels so sick, and counts the times the sky shifts and his stomach lurches even though

it's over

(you're dying)

five

six

Seven times, they get back on, spin the tire swing again. 'Til there's nothing to throw up and no one remembers a world where you can see straight or walk straight

because everything is spinning so fast

eight

(nine times, now--around and around)

You can't remember Dad hasn't been home since before Christmas. _How long has it been?_ You can't remember that Dean's last sandwich is mush in a trashcan, and yours is mush in your pocket. _What do you eat, now?_ You can't remember anything but the dizzy and the sick and

They're not here now. Why aren't you here now? Just Pastor Jim. Pastor Jim and a girl with a knife with a smile that bleeds over her face like it's wrong there.

Fingers curl around beads in his pocket.

ten

And then--

( _Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary_ , whispered helplessly).

 

\--

 

Was this what it was like for Mom? Being the

one

person left inside.

Dean feels Andrew Kimmel's hands clamp around his throat like hot irons.

 

\--

 

Two

demons. Put the pieces together, and it's the two of them. Brother and sister (and Simon Walker and the Carson City stranger and Andrew Kimmel and now Miss Jenny Gardner, too).

Have to be put down _now_ , or it's all over. Beech Duchess skirls when she lurches; been

three

minutes, maybe. Thirty seconds, maybe. Forever, maybe.

How long, you think, before it burns to scorched steel and broken glass (with Dean inside)?

 

\--

 

fourfivesix

seven

Just breathe. Breathe. It's gonna be okay.

eight

nine

ten one two _what comes next?_

Smoke-tears swim down his cheeks.

 

\--

 

Three

four

times around the rosary, and all Sam can hear is Pastor Jim's breathing, hard like he'd run around the world (chasing a ball of yarn).

Sam is

five

years old, and he is alone.

 

\--

 

_It's gonna be okay._

Dean is

six

seven

years old when he accepts what life is not anywhere _near_ okay, but sometimes he forgets. Is surprised all over again.

The plane all but shies from the flames, shudders like she can feel the heat taste the smoke hear the panic singing in Dean's everywhere, and the cargo from the back topples down around him

(eight

boxes on fire).

He strikes out wildly, tries to push them from his view. They knock Andrew Kimmel from his perch atop Dean, which is one good thing, but their weight and their bulk and their falling give Dean the impression he's being burned and buried alive. The open boxes from the top, now upturned, spill out beads, beads, more beads. Andrew Kimmel's hands around his neck are replaced by a string of beads, blue and white and he can't get them off they're all tangled up why can't he just _figure this out_ his hands aren't working, his brain's not working.

The one clear thought that sings out clear over the chaos: They're risking their _lives_ for these?

The plane, and the leaving Sam, and the kelpies in California, and the shitty town, and Jim Beatty, and the demons.

 _All_ of that was for...

Dean bites his lip 'til it bleeds. Hot wet billows up, like there's a fire coming out from inside him, as well.

The thought lasts only a moment. Andrew Kimmel wrenches his cardboard tomb apart, and with him comes the real fire

_he's on fire._

Andrew Kimmel is on fire, skin-peelng, burnt-smelling on fire, but it's more than that.

It's like he's got

nine

faces. They shift and move, snarling, writhing, like snakes like wolves like _demons._ Part black smoke, another bright, tight flesh. Just pieces of color and rage and emptiness, like--

Like everything bad that had ever happened, or could happen.

Rows and rows of teeth, nine faces with eighteen eyes, all crying and raging and crazy-gone.

Dean just stares. He can hardly separate Andrew Kimmel's new (true?) face from the warping, smoking scenery all around.

His fingers fly to the beads around his neck.

_Is that what Hell looks like?_

 

\--

 

Ten

rounds, straight into Andrew Kimmel. John doesn't bother with the heart (Kimmel's already good as dead, and bleeding out isn't going to stop what's in him, now).

The hands go first, in a small explosion of small bones and sinew. The neck (brainstem, spinal cord, anything). Tendons and ligaments, joints and nerve clusters.

Anything.

This kind of practiced assault, it's not from four years of sleeping with ghosts and putting down banshees. Comes before that. Comes before Sam, and Dean, and even Mary. It's a sharp slide to a place where nothing matters but the job; the enemy.

It's a pretty good place to be, you need to be someone's savior, not their father.

"Don't you step outside that circle," John commands, even as the plane continues to burn. It seems wrong. It seems right. And then the difference between the two ceases to exist.

With Andrew Kimmel out of the way (pitched against sheepskin somewhere, probably; bleeding spasms conducted behind a curtain of smoke), Dean squirms his way to the ground. He is singed and coughing, but receptive enough. He stays inside the fire lines.

The demon commends him, or so she says. "Even if that's the last body in the world I'd want to have. Though there are others, I suppose, who aren't so picky. Might've been worth it to see what you did. First Simon, and now Andrew, too. You keep racking up the body count like this, I'm going to start feeling ashamed of myself, for being so kind.

"You're a ruthless man, John Winchester. Be interesting to see how far you'd go." And it's that smile again. Slinks across her lips, baiting.

"See," she says, and John sees; he sees her step forward, with the same sibilance as her smile. "Humans bleed fear. Demons, we just eat it. If you ever go to Hell, you'll know--you're never afraid. If you have nothing, and no one, and no prospects for either, that's when you really lose. And you're just going through the motions 'til you realize that from there on out, it means you're always going to win, because you're not afraid of anything."

As if to prove her point, Jim starts wailing. Bouncing around Rita, who's low to the ground, unconscious of everything but trying to breathe. It's like watching Dean all over again, watching someone shaken to their core and helpless against the attack. It softens John's foundations (just a little, but enough) and he can almost feel their prospects sinking.

"What about him?" he asks. (Don't look at Rita. Don't look back.)

The demon shrugs. "Rough neighborhood. Hard to keep together if you don' fit in. Of course, what he doens't realize is he's more a demon than a human, now. People back home can't touch him, don't even recognize him. It's been a long time."

Bald understatement. "And why's it they can't see him? I can. So can my boy."

Another shrug. She stands, slack-shouldered, hands nested in the loop of Jenny Garnder's belt. "He knows things."

 _And so do you._ Things that give her that haughty air, things that breed in her smiles and spill slick over her words. Delicously secret things.

John has one bargaining chip. "And why do you want Sam?"

"Just want to take a little sampling, that's all. You're making it out to be a bigger deal than it is, being as uncooperative as you've been."

"It's been said," John allows.

"It's a good call." She bends down next to Rita, and casts her gaze upward at John. _What're you gonna do?_

_What can you even do?_

"Just not--quite--good _enough._ " Black smoke pours from her ears and nose and mouth, Beech Duchess in miniature. Jenny's body goes slack as the smoke departs, as though she were a bean doll, her stuffing all gone out.

Then Rita takes a deep shuddering breath, still caught in the throes of panic.

All that black smoke gets gone, and so does the panic. Trouble is, Rita's gone, too.

She kisses John, chaste on the cheek (second time, Winchester--you ever gonna buy me dinner?), then turns to Dean.

Dean looks like death, and he looks like smoke. He looks like fear, at the same time looking like he's resolved to be anything but scared. He's looking like he can't even register what's happened--or doesn't want to, maybe.

More than anything, he's looking awful, awful young.

"Don't worry, Dean-o." Enthusiastic falsetto, like a teacher or a babysitter from bygone days--not Rita at all. "It's all going to be okay."

 

**close your lies (i).**

 

 _He's little Sammy Winchester._ Everybody _wants him._

An airplane makes the sky rumble as it zooms out overhead, to someplace far away. It's flying so low still, the basement rattles.

Sam wants Dad.

Sam wants _Dean._

And, Sam thinks, he wants Mom. He wants the Mom who had friends, who showed him off like a diaper-wearing trophy. The Mom he's seen in pictures, a little--like the one on Pastor Jim's mantle before Dad shouted at him, made him take it down; or the one in the notebook Dad keeps, and won't let anyone see. He wants the Mom he suspects they celebrate every year, November 2nd. (Dad stays in for once, though he sleeps the whole time. Dean carefully cuts the crust from Sam's dinner--peanut butter and jelly.) He wants the Mom they can't talk about, and the Mom they can't talk to.

_Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary._

Sam wants the Mom who's worse than a ghost--she is a complete and utter stranger. Because after all, she is only as far away as the rest of his family. (If that's what they are. _You keep your brother close,_ Dad tells Dean, before he drives out to far-off nowhere. And then Dad takes Dean, too.)

Ruby shakes him like she knows his mind's gone someplace Not Here, and sends a shudder of force all down his body. It makes his bones hum, same way he felt hanging onto that upturned shopping cart, waiting for the dust to settle and telling Dean he hated, hated, hated him. Sam'd never been so scared in his life--at least 'til now.

 _If that's what they are._ They're not here now.

_Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary._

Sam is done.

Ruby only has eyes for Pastor Jim. She's taunting him, in a way Sam thought was only Dean's--his and Dean's. Seems wrong. Maybe; vaguely.

Doesn't matter.

Sam's just _done._

Ruby shakes him again, like he's a toy she wants Pastor Jim to fetch.

Sam whips the rosary into her face with as much sting and fury and upset as he can muster. Ruby snarls, unforgiving of his interruption--drops him as quick as the slap of beads. And Pastor Jim bolts, all but throws himself at the electric switches.

All the lights go out. It's dark, like the attic.

When they come on again, it's a cooler light, almost blue. Phosphorescent. It's got shadows painting a funny circle around Ruby's feet, from which Sam hastily slithers, like a discarded newt-tail. He doesn't need Pastor Jim shouting at him to do that.

When next he looks up--to look at Ruby, to look for Pastor Jim, somewhere in the black-and-blue bruised shadows--what he sees isn't real.

It can't be.

_Stop looking at that book and go to sleep, Dean says, with a gun in his hands and a look in his eyes like he's primed to watch the sun come up. Nothin' to be afraid of._

_Gimme that._

_See, look. Says it's a tailypo. Real things don't have dumb names like that; just a dog, is all. So stop getting into Dad's stuff and sleep already, Curious George._

_It's gonna be okay._

Back to real time--Pastor Jim's basement begs to differ. Might-be-Ruby's hurling curses and condemnations with a cold measured fury. They stick heavy in the air and her face and her arms and her body billow out, vacuum in--she is a thousand things and she is nothing and for Sam, she is _proof_ :

His big brother lied.


	9. Chapter 9

  
**Parts:** [1](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/65802.html) | [2](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/66113.html) | [3](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/66360.html) | [4](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/66654.html) | [5](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/66993.html) | [6](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/67156.html) | [7](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/67364.html) | [8](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/67706.html) | [**9 + a/n**](http://community.livejournal.com/clutt3rfuck/67898.html) | [Full Story (.PDF)](http://www.box.net/shared/60ycsfe5je) | [Artwork](http://starry-ice.livejournal.com/66626.html) by 

**fear (v).**

 

"November 2, 1983. You know the house. Was that you?" John can't say more than that. There's a reason it doesn't get talked about.

Rita-no-longer laughs. No; hardly. But maybe someday, she says, mock-wistful. It's in her blood, she says. And it's only a matter of time.

"What's your cut?" If this scheme pans out, what do you get?

Rita-no-longer says nothing. _Get to see you stand there, squirming, Winchester._ No reason, no plans. Your life burns down to a car and a ragged flight across the country. Every time you stop and think about pulling up somewhere and staying for good, something crops up tells you it ain't an option--not for you. And it all stems from no reason. 

And it's like Simon Walker all over again--same moves, same circles. Same caution, and same feeling dumb and unavailing. Only this time, it's Rita looking back at him, and he's not so ready to shoot. "So this is all some sick game to you?"

Maybe for _me_ , says her smile. But, "Somebody's got big plans. And somebody had to open the gate," says Rita-no-longer. "I know, Winchester. We're to blame; you're just a hapless victim. This all _happened_ to you. You didn't have any part in this."

But somebody had to open the gate. Little fish slips right through the cracks, and all the big ones follow.

John thinks fleetingly of Sam, but more of Old Jim, still roaming lost. He's orbiting Rita's body, feels like something's changed; is curious but does not venture more than a body's distance closer. It's sort of sickening sad, the look in his eyes. More like a lost child than a soul outta Hell.

"I wouldn't think too much on him," says the demon. "Jim Beatty doesn't have the wits to merit your sympathies. He doesn't understand Hell. Hardly remembers it. But you do, don't you, Winchester. That's why you asked about the house. Why you're out here"--and she gestures wide, a black silhouette against Beech Duchess burning--"hunting ghosts, demons, things in between...things that don't exist. Because you remember. Tell me you do: Hell claws its way up roaring, but when it's hunting--really hunting--it's quiet.

"--Like a tap on the shoulder."

White teeth in the darkness, flecked red with firelight.

Urgent disquiet. John's guard pulls up just quick enough for him to feel Old Jim at his back.

 

\--

 

Pastor Jim is reading fake words from a book.

_\--stop reading that book. It's not real. Something sounds that stupid, it's not real_

Ruby is on the ground. Her screams are real. She is real.

 

\--

 

Dean screws his eyes shut. They burn and water, and there are tears. (It's the smoke. Just the smoke.)

One long day ago, Dean did not watch Dad crash through the windshield, trying to land Beech Duchess. But this is that same stretch of land, and he still watched Dad fall. It wasn't so much a crash as it was a stagger, a misstep, and a fold--like so many cards when the tower falls down.

 _Game face, Dad,_ is Dean's first reaction. Whatever's wrong, bury it. Don't let anyone see. Don't let them see. Stagger into the motel room at 3am all you want. Yell. Brood. 

Just come back. 

That's family business, not Other business.

(Cry into smoke-saturated sheets. Just make sure everyone else is asleep, or too drunk to care--and whose business is that? The lies and the hiding and the silence--where do they stop?)

"Blue Earth," says Rita-no-more, words sharp and clipped the way real Rita's never were. It stops at Blue Earth. "You stopped at Blue Earth, didn't you. Got a car 'locked up there,' isn't that right? That's what you said to pretty buxom Rita, you remember?"

Dean's chest is tight. The beads still around his neck are dead weight against his lungs. No. Nono _no_. Breathe.

Breathe.

"You poor, stupid baby." Stalks straight towards him. Leaves Dad in a heap-- _he cannot protect you_ \--and revels in the heat of flames at Dean's back. Too hot to stay this close, soon. Too hard to breathe. That's when he'll be forced to leave the circle.

And barring Sammy, Dean's the next best thing.

"This is why you shouldn't talk to strangers."

_Take your brother outside and run._

So Dean runs. Which, also barring Sammy, is also the next best thing. 

"Hey, Old Jim!" he shouts-croaks. "I'll race you." (It's a last ditch thing.) 

And he runs. He doesn't run fast--not tear-blind and smoke-clogged and dead-tired--and isn't headed anywhere, but he runs _hard._ But Jim does run fast, 100-meter-dash champion fast, and he _does_ go somewhere.

_Somebody has to open the gate._

Hell's Gate opens, when Old Jim blitzes out into the black. Maybe the moon is just right, or Mars; mabe neither. Dean doubts he'll ever know, doesn't expend an oberabundance of his attentions on the logistics. The moon is up, the sun is down, and Hell's Gate is moving.

It doesn't look like anything that Dean can see, but the resulting flux to the atmosphere is staggering. Dean's knees buckle, and it's like his lungs just collapse, it's so hard just to keep breathing, or show any signs of life.

Rita-no-more pins Dean to the ground, forces him face-up. He can feel Hell, like the breeze coming out from under a door. It feels like Old Jim.

"What are you doing!" she screams. "What the fuck do you think you're doing!"

Hell leeches, twists and burns. It is all Dean can do to perceive her dizzily, her fury lost in the din and rock of memories, futures, Hells.

Hell is the hot-cold, soft-sharp, thrash-calm of your head bobbing above the surface of water, before being forced down again. Hell is

_rope burns livid across Sammy's baby palms, and a red kite in a grey tree, their one good thing lost and snaggled in the branches. Throwing the spool at Sam's head and making him scream harder than he already was. Being so mad he didn't even care._

_setting iron jacks around the door, and nearly yelling for Sammy to get his sissy butt out of the bathroom. Catching himself, when he remembers it's Dad in there. Dad doing who knows what, while Sammy is who knows where._

_breaking Rita's salt shaker on Old Jim's chin, making ribbons of his palms in the glass and dirt and salt._

_burning house crashing plane stupid brother screaming rib broken toy absent father dead mother difficult school empty motel room impounded car heavy rifle thin-soled shoes evil evil evil_ I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU.

Fear. And beyond fear, ceasing to care (or ceasing to be cared for).

Dad's shaking it off as best he can, handling it better than Dean's sure he ever did. But he's twenty yards too late for this to be his fight.

The demon rakes her fingers down the curve of Dean's ribs, like she's about to split him down the center, tear out his insides. She is furious, _You fucking son of a bitch, what'd you think you were doing, what'd you think you were doing with that--that-- (That's_ Hell's Gate.)

Don't scare from things you can't fix.

Dad is ten yards away. Rita's nails are ten hair-breadths from his heart.

Don't scare from things you can't fix. Not when someone's counting on you.

_He can still feel the weight of the rifle across his lap. The dead space in his head as the hours stretch on, the nonplussed dread of knowing that any tailypo comes knocking, he and Sammy will die, no question. The flush disappointment when John Winchester walks through the door, but Dad does not (and when does he ever)._

Not when someone's counting on you.

Dean tears at the beads around his neck. The cord snaps, and the beads fly out in a wide arc. If it hurts at all, Rita-no-more doesn't register. All she does is billow out, a many-textured piece of Hell itself, contorted and fraying.

Hell's Gate ducks, and a wave of tension pulses out through the air, a great shockwave of fear and power.

Old Jim wisps away under the pressure; Dean can hear his scream, "Hallooo! Welcome to Beatty, Nevada." Then he's gone, or maybe never was. The Gate keeps sucking, and it's like Dean can feel parts of him go with it.

Rita's mouth vomits black smoke into Dean's face, and parts of her go too. He can feel her wisp through his fingers--vanish--but other parts of her tuck into him, find safe harbor in his nose and mouth. She stays.

The taste, as it quickly tries to gestate under Dean's tongue, is acrid. Life-stealing. But not as wretched as he imagined (he's familiar with the flavor).

He is not afraid.

Dean closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath in.

 

\--

 

"This isn't--" the demon spits. She has the rosary pulled taut against her throat, and her lips are morning glory blue.

"Over," Jim finishes. "I know." He recites the last of the exorcism, and thinks of Mary. The demon leaves its host in a great snake of smoke, the residue of which hangs in the air like nightmares and memories. _"I know."_

 

\--

 

No.

_Dean, you spit that out this instant! says Mary, of a tiny plastic Corvette Stingray. It is 1981. Dean is two, and teething. He is growing up so fast._

Now, John just shouts, "Dean!" and apportions the rest of his breath to the final three feet between his arms and his boy.

Slide into first base.

(They collide, and it's a terrific mess, and catcher runner baseball, John cannot begin to discern. He knocks Rita's full frame straight onto Dean, he knows, but a thing like that doesn't deter demon possession, of that much he's sure.)

_No._

Hell's Gate pulses again, sends a jolt of renewed panic to chase the dose of Old Jim's that John's still shaking. _Please._ There's a rush of air and a terrible stripping away and

There's a lot of blood, John realizes. A lake in the crease and cave of Dean's shirt. And at first, John--

 _doesn't matter how careful you are, Winchester; you're just not good enough--Mary wasn't, so what does that even_ make _you?_

but then--

He sees the knife in Dean's hands, silver tarnished red with blood and the reflection of flames.

And then, he thinks--

is he gonna see night pooled in Dean's eyes, to match?

And he thinks, what's he gonna do if that's what he sees?

 

**close your lies (ii).**

 

"Open your eyes, Sam. It's all right now."

Sam shakes his head.

Absolutely not.

 

**fear (vi).**

 

Dean's cheeks itch with hot tears, and his lungs still burn.

When Dad cups Dean's face between his hands and presses his forehead to Dean's hairline, Dean is lost for a moment. He does not understand why Dad is making such a fuss, this one time. Why he's not a yelling-angry kind of worried, or just angry outright. He doesn't understand why, this one time, he is being hugged tight, and Dad is chanting, _It's gonna be okay. Gonna be okay. Gonna be okay._

Dean can't disentangle his fingers from the hilt of the knife. Every time he does, he thinks of the blood, and where it's from, and he just feels sick all over again.

That's when he remembers the smoke. And the letting it all down his insides, and the fracturing pain as it was ripped from him.

Hell's Gate.

And he realizes, he's not being held because he's crying. Not in the normal way. Dad's holding him because he's still _him_. Still John Winchester's son.

Dean's not sure he shares Dad's elation. The knife's still glued in his hand, and he knows what he's done.

 

\--

 

John doesn't care. There's an awkward step where his mind floods with tall, misty orange glasses and dark curls and his arms around a stomach as a motorcycle tears into the desert, but the thoughts list and he's thinking _Dean Dean Dean_.

He shuts his eyes to the blood damping down the dust, dark curls in violent disarray just next to him. He can't--he can't look at that. At her.

He can't think about that right now. He holds Dean tighter.

Dean cries into John's shoulder; once-was-Rita seeps, warm and wet, into his pants. Hell's Gate twists into itself. When the pressure lifts, John sags, Dean goes rigid, and Rita doesn't move at all.

The moon paints everything in shades of grey and black, which makes western Nevada look a whole lot like clouds viewed topside, from inside one Beech Duchess. (Looks like Heaven, or Hell. Looks like both. Looks like every nightmare John has ever lived, or stands to.)

Dean starts them moving again. He backs up from John's hold, straight and silent. John's fingers brush the dirt as they drop to his side and a chill runs through him as they catch on dark curls and cold lips.

(He can't think about that. He can't.)

He swallows.

Dean first.

John edges the blade from Dean's hands, shaking it loose leaden finger by leaden finger. Small hands, still round with baby fat. He wipes the blood from them as best he can, though he doesn't know why. Dean's shirt is still an undisguisable mess. He just can't-- (He can't.)

After he's given the blade a pass with his shirtsleeve, he hands it back, hilt first. Dean doesn't move, though John didn't expect he would. He doesn't know what he would have done if Dean had. He doesn't know what to do now that Dean hasn't. "You had to," he says. Those three words drop like stones into blackness, and go unacknowledged. _You had to._

And maybe Dean did, maybe Dean didn't. John will never know. But it's these three words John lives by, and he cannot look back now.

Rita isn't nine years old, and she isn't four-foot-three, but John collects her in his arms and carries her body across the black and rolls her (too skillfully) into the cockpit of Beech Duchess, still burning. He watches her catch, and ignores the livid red of his hands, the burn of smoke at the back of his throat. Rita is not his family, but she is one more person he has gravely disappointed. She is one more life that's blood on his hands and ash in his hair and crawling guilt under his skin. He turns from the pyre and scuffs dirt over the trail of blood leading back to Dean, unmoved. 

He stops next to Dean, opens his brown leather book, and writes, "Beatty, 1988." 

Then he puts the book away, without further elaboration.

John takes Dean by the hand and leads him away from the funeral pyre and the pillar of smoke and the burning everything, and not once does he look back.

He can't.

John leads them back to one of the phantom towns between Beatty, Nevada, and Hell's Gate, Nowhere. He does not once think about his hands around someone's waist and someone's hair in his face and someone's voice, putting names to the hovels filled with ghosts.

 _Don't,_ he warns himself. It's in the journal; it can't be on his mind anymore. He has the present to contend with.

It's hours later when they reach the first phantom town, and John drags Dean up to one of the decrepit shacks. He prods Dean toward a corner, and Dean sits. And he looks, in the moonlight, as much a ghost as anyone in town.

John abruptly puts the thought from his mind and takes the opposite corner for himself. Dean hasn't said one word.

John isn't keen on forcing life into the silence. Not here, not now. Not tonight.

So they sit silently, knees drawn up to their chests, heads knocked back against the wall of the ghost shack. There's a cold, wide distance between them.

Minutes pass--hours, maybe. Days. Lifetimes. John listens to a skritch-scratch as Dean draws scraggly shapes in the dust with the shriveled head of a piece of brush. 

"You were right," Dean says, finally.

No, John thinks. Whatever Dean means, no--he was not.

"You were right, leaving Sammy with Pastor Jim. He shouldn't have been here for this." Dean is looking at his hands again. The hilt of Dean's knife digs into John's gut uncomfortably as he shifts position.

"It's...good that he wasn't here for this."

 _Shouldn't have brought you, either, kid._ But leaving him would have been just as wrong. He should have left Dean; he was right to bring Dean. He should have left them both, and brought them both. He should have kept the house in Lawrence, he should have honored Mary by living as she would have; he should be in Beatty, Nevada, trying to even the score, fight back. He should protect his children. He should (and she'd said this, she actually had-- _Don't coddle our children, John. They're made of more than you think. They'll be all right._ ) let them learn to protect themselves.

None or all of the above--there's no right way out. There absolutely isn't.

He looks at Dean one last time before settling into some semblance of sleep, and he knows he will never stop wishing there was.

This is all he says: "Try to get some shut-eye. We got a long drive tomorrow."

And Dean says nothing.

 

\--

 

Dean spends the six hours to sunrise pinned under Rita's body all over again.

He can feel her dead weight pressing down on him and her wet life soaking into his shirt. He can't feel the knife in his hands; too numb.

He can still taste the black smoke--sulfurous, questing--trail all the way down his throat (and permeate deeper still). He remembers being afraid. 

He remembers realizing, jaggedly, that he was tired of being afraid. He remembers whipping the knife from his belt, and thinking, _I refuse, I fucking refuse I refuse I refuse I refuse_ , and the black smoke taking an abrupt U-turn, spilling out of his mouth like vomit, and he remembers holding the knife like it was the one thing that was going to save him; like so long as he kept hold of that one thing--that _one_ thing--it would be okay. He remembers being that knife in his hand. He remembers being powerful, being fearless. So long as he had that one thing, nothing else mattered. He could fly.

 

(And then there was Rita.)

 

\--

 

When sun leaks over the horizon and John drags himself into consciousness once more, eighteen seconds go by before he hears Dean draw breath.

John breathes out then, too. Tastes the bile of panic in his throat. He doesn't breathe again until he hears Dean suck in air one, two normal (albeit sharp and hiccuping) times.

John knows the look in Dean's eyes like he knows his own face in the mirror.

Dean wasn't ready--isn't. But neither was John, and neither _is_ John, and that's when John realizes that no one ever is, or ever will be.

But ready or not, you'll take what you can get.

 

**thirty seconds.**

 

_You good?_

"Yeah."

_Yeah, me too. Me an' Dad are on our way back now._

"You took a long time."

_I know._

"I lost count."

_Me too. See you in a few, Sammy._

"Bye."

Dial tone.

Dean sounded relieved. He sounded like he's finished telling a very big lie and Dad didn't catch on and no one is going to get in trouble. Sam frowns.

Dean _sounded_ like he was either about to cry or about to laugh (it's hard to tell sometimes), but since Dean doesn't have anything to cry about, he must be hiding some good secret from Sam.

Sam rolls his fingers across the blues of his rosary, which he hasn't taken from his neck since--(well). Selenite, to dispel illusions, and sodalite, to assuage fear, said Pastor Jim. Very powerful, said Pastor Jim. _It's going to be all right,_ said Pastor Jim.

Sam thinks of Ruby's monster face and Dean's obvious lies and Dad's not-being and all the things Pastor Jim has in his basement and he thinks, he's missing something. Something bigger than just Dean and maybe even Dad, too.

Pastor Jim takes the phone and guides him to the kitchen, where the biggest, most elaborate, most apologetic breakfast is waiting for him, but in between bites of pancake and strawberry and vast flurries of whipped cream, Sam still misses Dad and Dean most.

He doesn't understand why Dean only gave him thirty seconds. Why all Dean said was 'me too, me too.' Shouldn't there be more than that? (Shouldn't there?)

Pastor Jim feeds him more scrambled eggs instead. Then he asks, when Sam is finished with this breakfast, if Sam would meet him downstairs.

In the basement, not the chapel.

Sam's first reaction is a frantic 'no' but his second is a nod. It would have been difficult for him to reconcile the two, but then Pastor Jim says, _Please_ , and that is that.

Downstairs, Pastor Jim has erected a cot for the girl from yesterday. Sam feels a wave of revulsion, confusion, that numbs his legs before he can even cross the room. She was a monster, she had tried to hurt them; he knew what she really was, he'd seen it. She--

"This is Ruby, from Clayton, Illinois. She turned eleven last April." Pastor Jim dabs at her forehead with a wet cloth and squeezes her hand. Her black church shoes rest at the foot of the cot. Her feet, still in stockings, twitch under the blue-green-orange quilt. She gives a soft moan; save the _plink plink_ of Pastor Jim's cloth as water drips back into the tin basin beside him, the room is quiet and grey.

Sam keeps strict hold of the doorknob and watches. He can't shake the idea that she will come screaming after him, grabbing and clawing. He jams his free hand into his pocket when it begins to tremble.

"Sam, please come here," says Pastor Jim. Gentle, slow, the way he says everything to Sam (except for yesterday). The request echoes in the grey room, makes it seem like it's coming from everywhere at once. 

It's like Ruby's monster voice, and her monster face, and her-- _her_. Sam cannot come. He cannot come to her.

"She is not what you think she is."

Sam could laugh, Pastor Jim was being so silly. That girl was not what he thought she was _yesterday._ Now he knows.

Pastor Jim sighs, and moves to turn out the lights. Two switches off, one on; the circle with the lines and the letters shines down in watery fluorescent light. Sam doesn't know how, but that was the thing that stopped monster-Ruby, while Pastor Jim had said the nonsense words. Pastor Jim repeats his request, and Sam takes one, two, three shaky, tentative steps into the circle.

"When you are very afraid," Pastor Jim begins. He gives Ruby a cursory glance before turning the entirety of his attentions on Sam. "it's easy to become something...different from who you really are."

Sam doesn't follow, but he puts on his best knowing face: brow furrowed, lips upturned. He runs a hand back through his hair. "So what are you instead?"

"Your father's familiar with the fallout," Pastor Jim says quickly, but divulges no further details. "Just know that fear is transformative, warping, it--" He stops and tries again. "When you're afraid, you open yourself to more bad things than you realize. But if you can be calm, most of those bad things--they can't change you. You cannot be afraid."

But it's Pastor Jim who's scaring him now. (What does all that even mean? What can it possibly mean?) "Calm...like Dad?" Because Dad's not scared of anything.

Pastor Jim coughs. "Your father has devised alternate strategies; 'calm' isn't the word I'd use." Which doesn't really make Sam feel any better. Pastor Jim dismisses him shortly thereafter, with vague directions that seem to involve rinsing his breakfast dishes all by himself.

All the way up the stairwell and into the chapel, Sam thinks of Ruby's monster face, and he thinks about the girl downstairs, and he thinks about bad things getting into you, making you different from who you're supposed to be. The strawberries and the pancakes from earlier sit uneasily in his belly. 

He thumbs his rosary in his pocket and counts to ten.

If he listens closely enough, he can hear Pastor Jim downstairs, grey and muffled and echoing.

_Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil._

 

**september firsts.**

 

Jim and Sammy are waiting outside when John and Dean pull up in someone else's Chevy. 

When John reaches the porch, Jim tosses him a keyring. "For losing your child," he says, and gestures toward the side of the church, where the Impala is waiting. Dean's already on it, inspecting her insides, searching for familiarity in ash trays and seat crevices.

John tears his gaze from the car and nods a belated thanks. He keeps quiet on the subject of totaled planes, lost rosaries, and the continuing existence of kelpies in California, and so does Jim. "I'll take him off your hands, then," John says, in lieu of the list of damages the last few days have incurred.

Sammy stays behind Jim, face buried in Jim's vestments.

Evidently, the Impala's interior passes Dean's test, because he opens the door with a tentative creak. Meets John's eyes, then looks toward Sam.

He crawls out of the backseat and takes a few steps toward the rest of them on the porch, then hesitates. Hangs back, like there's an invisible barrier between him and Sammy.

Quietly: "Hey, Sammy."

No one moves, and no one speaks.

Then Sammy bolts pell-mell toward the Impala and Dean.

Dean gives a shriek of relief, delight, _everything_ and jumps back in the car; slams the door. He bounces around inside, smacking down the locks, as Sammy runs squawky circles around the Impala, catching himself in the tall weeds and tripping and falling and laughing.

"We sent a demon to Hell last week." Jim's tone is careful, measured. John doesn't miss the plural.

"Hallowed ground?"

"Didn't matter."

"Not the--"

"No. But it wanted your son, alive. Went so far as to befriend him."

Another one of the opportunists their demon friends in Beatty mentioned, John presumes. It doesn't mean anything yet; not until he finds out more, but now John knows for sure. What happened to Mary that night, what happened to all of them--it's not over. He imagines Sammy older, stronger, but still just as helpless against--(against what?). He imagines him out of reach, in every possible way. He can't suppress the shudder.

It's not over.

"Let's go, Dad!" Dean calls. His voice is laden with painful exuberance. Overcompensation. But he's trying; they're all trying. (Feels like the second they hit the open road, Sam starts asking questions. Bad questions. And the fear doesn't ever go away, not ever. But John didn't think it would).

Jim clasps him on the shoulder. "It wasn't supposed to happen."

John nods. A lot of things weren't. But they did, and here they are, and here they're gonna be, 'til something upsets that--because someday it will. He knows it will. He takes a deep breath.

"You take your time getting to California this time." 

John aims to.

It's no longer late August. On September first, John puts the Impala in reverse and backs out toward the main road, rolling black through the gold and brown of fallen leaves.

The familiar rock of the car and the roll of the street below them lulls John to silence, and Dean and Sammy to familiar, heated bickering in the backseat, and the world is right for one bright, fleeting afternoon.

There are still kelpies in California. This family can save falling apart for another day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **+** Disclaimer first: Aside from the desert filled with tufty, funny-looking weeds, the real Beatty is **absolutely nothing** like fic!Beatty. That being said, the first half of this is based on a trip my uncle took with my grandfather in the 70s. They flew a plane from Kansas to California, semi-illegally (licensed pilot, wrong kind of plane). They got lost in Nevada, landed in the middle of nowhere, paid a guy living in a bus to tell them which direction they should walk to hit the nearest town, and met a man named Beatty in the town of Beatty, who really loved talking about Beatty. This is about where their story diverges from this one but amazingly? I think theirs was even more cracktastic. So...thank you, family, for being bizarre enough to inspire fic! And for living to tell the tale, and such-like. :F
> 
>  **+** When I started writing this story (in January or whenever it was: first SPN fic, first plot fic, first long!fic. It's been quite the trip. XP Over the course of this year's Big Bang, I've gained a better idea of how to approach this sort of project and, most importantly what my strengths/weaknesses are as a writer--so I label this a win! I'm definitely looking forward to putting these reflections to use in future ventures. That being said, any and all constructive criticism is full welcome (as it always is), if you are so inclined to give it. :)


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